The Smithy

Divine Simplicity III: Univocity

2012-01-22T16:30:00.002-05:00

[NB: this is a first draft, that I will make every effort in the future to revise by adding commentary and fixing typos, etc.]

As promised, here is the post on the topic that inspired this series of "fundamenta" posts: how can Scotus reconcile his theory of univocity with divine simplicity?

We all know what Thomas says. The terms that we predicate of God from creatures (being, wise, good, just, etc.) exist in a divided way in creatures, as distinct from their essence. But God is simple, admitting no plurality. Consequently, the terms must be predicated analogically, not univocally.

Scotus' discussion of the issue is found in Ordinatio I d. 8 q. 3, entitled "Whether to say that God, or something formally said of God, is in a genus is consonant with divine simplicity.

He is trying to avoid a model of reality in which Being is a genus and God and creatures are species of being. If this were the case, divine simplicity would be violated. This is because there would be a common reality of the genus by which God and creatures would agree, and a reality that was proper to each. God would then have composition of genus and specific difference.

For the negative position, Scotus examines the opinion of Henry of Ghent (not Aquinas), citing a number of arguments, offering arguments against the position (these are the arguments for univocity I have already posted) and replying to Henry's arguments. He also cites an opinion for the positive position, though it is probably more of a set-up than an opinion anyone actually held (i.e. that God is in a genus).

Scotus, then, holds a middle position:

Ordinatio I d. 8 p. 1 q. 3 (ed. Vat. IV, 198):

I hold the middle position, that it stands with divine simplicity that some concept is common to God and to a creature, not nevertheless some concept common as of a genus, because neither a concept said in 'quid' of God, //nor by whatever kind of formal predication said of him// is per se in some genus.

The first part was proved by arguing against the first opinion [i.e. Henry]

So Scotus then argues that the concept is not going to be common like a genus is in common. He has two arguments for this, one from the notion of infinity, the other from the notion of necessary being.

1. Infinity (ed. Vat. IV 199-203):

A concept having indifference to some things to which a concept of a genus cannot be indifferent can not be a concept of a genus; but whatever is said commonly of God and creatures is indifferent to finite and infinite, speaking of essential [things], or at least to the finite and not finite, speaking of certain others, because a divine relation is not finite; no genus can be indifferent to infinite and the finite, therefore etc.

The first part of the minor is clear, because whatever essential perfection is in God, is formally infinite, in creatures finite.

I prove the second part of the minor, because a genus is taken from some reality which according to itself is potential to the reality from which the difference is taken; no infinite is potential to something...

This argument, by treating it further, I understand in this way: that in some creaures the genus and difference are taken from another and another reality (just as by positing many forms in man, animal is taken from the sensitive and rational from the intellective), and then that thing, from which the genus is taken, truly is potential and perfectible by that thing from which the difference is taken. Sometimes, when there are not there thing and thing (just as in accidents), at least in one thing there is some proper reality from which the genus is taken and another reality from which the difference is taken; let the first be called a and the second b: a according to itself is potential to b, so that by precisely understanding a and precisely understanding b, a as it is understood in the first instant of nature, in which it is precisely itself, it is perfectible by b (just as if it were another thing), but that it is not perfected really by b, this is because of the identity of a and b to some total [totum] thing, to which really they are primarily the same, which indeed totum first is produced and in that totum both those realities are produced: if nevetheless one of those would be produced without the other, truly it would be potential to it and truly it would be imperfect without it.

That composition of realities - potential and actual - is the smallest which suffices for the notion of genus and difference, and that does not stand with this that whatsoever reality in something is infinite: for reality, if it would be infinite of itself, however precisely taken, would not be in potency to some reality; therefore since in God whatsoever essential reality is formally infinite, there is nothing from which the notion of a genus can be formally taken.

2. From necessary being (ed. Vat. IV, 204 ff.)

I argue third from the second middle [term], namely from the notion of necessary being, and this is the argument of Avicenna, VIII Met. ch. 4. If necessary being has a genus, therefore the intention of the genus will be of itself necessary being or not. If the first, 'then [the inquiry] will not cease until there is a difference'. I understand this thus: the genus would then include a difference, because without it it is not in ultimate act and the 'necessary in itself' is in ultimate act; if however the genus includes a difference, then it is not a genus. If the second option is followed, it follows that 'necessary being will be constituted from what is not necessary being.

[there follows an addition by Scotus here] but this argument proves that necessary being has nothing in common with another, because that common intention is 'not necessary being'; hence I answer: an understood intention neither includes necessity nor possibility, but is indifferent; that however in reality which corresponds to an intention, in 'this' is necessary being, in 'that' possible (this is disproved if a proper reality corresponds to the intention of a genus, and not if it corresponds to another common intention). [end of addition]

With respect to that which is added in the question 'of whatever formally said of God' [see the opening paragraph], I say that no such is in a genus, because of the same, because nothing is said formally of God which is limited; whatever is of some genus, whatever genus that might be, is necessarily limited.

But then there is a doubt about what sort are those predicates which are said of God, such as wise, good, etc.

I answer. Being is first divided into infinite and finite than into the ten categories, because one of those, namely the finite, is common to the ten genera; therefore whatever befalls being as indifferent to finite and infinite, or as it is proper to infinite being, befalls it not as determined to a genus but as prior, and consequently as it is a transcendental and is outside every genus. Whatever is common to God and creature, are such which befall being as it is indifferent to finite and infinite: for as they befall God, they are infinite, and as they befall a creature they are finite; therefore first they befall being than being is divided into the ten genera, and consequently whatever is such is transcendent [transcendens].

But then there is another doubt, how wisdom can be called a transcendental since it is not common to all beings.

I answer. Just as it is of the definition of 'most general' that it does not have under itself many species but not to have another genus above it (just as this category 'where', because it does not have a supervening genus it is most general, although it has few or no species), so a transcendental has no genus under which it is contained. Whence it is of the notion(ratio) of a transcendental that it does not have a predicate that supervenes, except being, but that it is common to many inferiors, this befalls it.

This is clear in another way, because being does not have passions/attributes that are simply convertible, just as one, true, and good, but has some passions where opposites are distinguished against each other, just as necessary being or possible being, act or potency, and suchlike. Just as convertible passions/attributes are transcendent because they follow upon being in so far as it is not determined to some genus, so disjunctive passions/attributes are transcendental, and each member of the disjunct is transcendental because neither determines its determinable to a certain genus: and nevertheless one member of the disjunct formally is special, not befalling unless one being, just as necessary being in that division between necessary being or possible being, and the infinite in that division of finite or infinite, and the same is true of the rest. So also wisdom can be a transcendental, and whatever other, which is common to God and creature, although some such is said of God alone, something however is also said of God and some creature. It is not necessary that a transcendental, qua transcendental, be said of every being unless it is convertible with the first transcendental, namely being.

[to the first principal argument, (ed. Vat. IV 221ff):

To the first principal argument I concede that that concept said of God and a creature in 'quid' [i.e. essentially] is contracted by some contracting concepts saying 'quale' , but neither is that concept said in 'quid' a concept of a genus, nor those concepts said in 'quale' are concepts of differences, because that 'quidditative' concept is common to finite and infinite, which community cannot be in the concept of a genus -- those concepts contracting mean the intrinsic mode of the contracted, and not some reality perfecting it: differences however do not mean the intrinsic mode of the reality of some genus, because in whatever grade animality is understood, not on account of this is rationality or irrationality understood to be the intrinsic mode of animality, but still animality is understood in such a grade as perfectible by rationality or irrationality.

But here there is a doubt: how can a concept common to God and creature be understood as 'real', unless by some reality of the same genus, and then it seems that it is potential to that reality from which the distinguishing concept is taken, just as was argued before about the concept of a genus and a difference, and then the argument made for the first position still stands, that if there would be some reality distinguishing in re, and another distinct, it seems that a thing is composed, because it has something by which it agrees and something by which it differs.

I answer that when some reality with its intrinsic mode is understood, that concept is not so irreducibly simple (simpliciter simplex) that that reality cannot be conceived without that mode, but then it is an imperfect concept of that thing; it is able also to be conceived under that mode, and then it is a perfect concept of that thing. Example: if there would be whiteness in the tenth grade of intensity, howsoever simple it might be in the thing, it can still be conceived under the aspect of such whiteness, and then perfectly it will be conceived by an adequate concept of that thing, or it can be conceived precisely under the aspect of whiteness, and then it would be conceived by an imperfect concept which falls from the perfection of the thing; an imperfect concept however can be common to this and that whiteness, and a perfect concept would be proper.

Therefore a distinction is required between that from which a common concept is taken and between that from which a proper concept is taken not as distinction of reality and reality but as distinction of reality and proper and intrinsic mode of the same, which distinction suffices for having a perfect concept or imperfect of the same, of which the imperfect is common and the perfect is proper. But the concept of genus and difference requires the distinction of realities, not only of the same reality perfectly and imperfectly conceived.

To summarize:

Scotus takes two doctrines as given, because they were proven elsewhere.

1. Divine simplicity
2. univocal predication of creaturely properties of God, with qualification.

In this question, Scotus expands this picture

3. the properties predicated of God are not in a genus, because this would require a distinction of realities: the reality of the genus is other than the reality of the difference [keep in mind, the model Scotus is trying to avoid is that Being is a genus, and creatures and God are two species of being. There would be one reality, being, by which God and creatures agree, and one reality by which they are distinct]

4. The properties are transcendentals, arranged in four grades: being, attributes of being (one, true, good, maybe thing), disjunctive attributes of being (necessary being vs. possible being, etc.), pure perfections (wisdom, justice, etc.).

5. univocal predication gives us a common concept, say of wisdom; it is common to God and creatures. As such, the common concept is imperfect. The univocal notion can be contracted to God and creatures by means of intrinsic modes. The concept of God or a creature taken with its respective intrinsic mode is imperfect, but this is not a distinction between two realities, but of one reality. Hence the problem mentioned in 3 is avoided.

Scotus on the Scandal of Philosophy

2012-01-19T20:32:00.001-05:00

We've all read statements by early modern philosophers complaining about the diversity of opinions held by philosophers and how this is a bad thing.

But Scotus disagrees. The following text is from the 1517 John Major printing of the Reportatio (free for download at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek). Eventually, this will be labeled Rep. IB, prol. q. 2 (ed. Major 2va):

Dicitur primo pro quaestione prima, quia utilis est diversitas opinionum propter nostri intellectus imbecillitatem, et scientie profunditatem, et propter studentium profectum, et propter veritatis elucidationem.

It is said to the first question that a diversity of opinions is useful on account of the weakness of our intellect, and the profundity of knowledge, and because of the progress of the ones studying, and on account of the elucidation of truth.

Review of Brad Gregory's New Book

2012-01-16T11:55:00.000-05:00

Here. The beginning of it is like a bad game of telephone. The reviewer seems to misunderstand Gregory's explanation of univocity, and Gregory himself misunderstood Scotus.

Some snippets:

The book's first chapter, "Excluding God," begins with what I regard as an accurate portrayal of the modern intellectual's arbitrary and illogical refusal to countenance any explanation of the world's origins, no matter how cogent that explanation may be, if it happens to include God. The roots of this mindset reach back centuries, Mr. Gregory says, to the late-medieval theologian John Duns Scotus, who argued that God and man both exist in the same essence of things and that therefore man may speak of God with "univocal" as opposed to "analogical" language. In Scotus's thinking, the word "wise," for example, might apply to God in the same sense in which it applies to man. This had the effect, says Mr. Gregory, of defining God as if He were bound by the material world rather than transcendent over it. And when this view combined with William of Occam's "razor"—the principle that the best argument is the one with the fewest unnecessary parts—philosophers eventually felt emboldened to exclude God from any explanation of natural phenomena: and, in time, from any argument at all.

Very interesting, one might think—except that the book presents no evidence that any Protestant reformer actually espoused "univocal metaphysics," in the author's phrase. Nothing from Luther or Calvin on the subject, nothing from William Farel or Martin Bucer. Mr. Gregory does mention the Swiss Reformation leader Ulrich Zwingli and his disavowal of Christ's real presence in the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper, but that position is hardly the "logical corollary" to univocal metaphysics that the author claims. Transubstantiation is a far more "univocal" reading of the words "This is my body" than Zwingli's interpretation. But never mind. When Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche and, more recently, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris formulated their skeptical views of religion, Mr. Gregory says, they thought of God in reductive, univocal terms, and this was somehow a long-term consequence of the Protestant Reformation.

[...]

Leaving aside Mr. Gregory's preposterously overwrought characterization of modern Western societies, especially America—he sees little beyond depredation, exploitation, consumerism and global warming—his complaint that modern Western morality elevates acquisitiveness to the status of a virtue is justified. But blaming this state of affairs on events that occurred and people who lived five centuries ago is a sort of rearview-mirror utopianism: If only the right social order had been left in place—if only the Protestant reformers hadn't shattered medieval Catholicism's "institutionalized worldview"—life today would be so much better.

New Henry edition

2012-01-14T11:55:00.001-05:00

Henry of Ghent's Quodlibet IV is now available, for a cool 89 euros.

From the website:

Henry of Ghent, the most influential philosopher/theologian of the last quarter of the 13th century at Paris, delivered his fourth Quodlibet during 1279. This Quodlibet was written at the beginning of what could be called the height of his career.

In total there are 37 questions, which cover a wide range of topics, including theories in theology, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical anthropology, ethics, and canon law. In these questions Henry presents his mature thought concerning the number of human substantial forms in which he counters the claims of the defenders of Thomas Aquinas, particularly those in Giles of Lessines’s De unitate formae, but also those found in Giles of Rome’s Contra Gradus. He is critical of Thomas Aquinas’s theories concerning human knowledge, the ‘more’ and the ‘less,’ and virtue. He also is critical of Bonaventure’s analysis of Augustine’s notion of rationes seminales.

There are 33 known manuscripts which contain the text of Quodlibet IV, and the critical text is reconstructed based upon manuscripts known to have been in Henry’s school, as well as manuscripts copied from two successive university exemplars in Paris.

Table of contents

Foreword

Critical Study

The Editions and Manuscripts

The Editions

The Manuscripts

Quodlibet IV: Authorship and Date
§1. The Authorship of Quodlibet IV§2. The Date of Quodlibet IV

The Text Examined Exteriorly: Historical and Codicological Elements Used for the Establishment of the Text
§1. Quodlibet IV: Distributed by Means of Two Successive Exemplars by the University in Paris
A. The First University Exemplar
B. A Second Parisian University Exemplar

The Text Examined Interiorly: The Relationships among the Manuscripts, Established by a General Test Collation
§1. The Common Accidents
A. The Groups of Manuscripts Characterized by the Number of Common Accidents
B. The Groups of Manuscripts Characterized Individually
1. Manuscript A
2. The Group of Manuscripts Dependent upon the First Parisian University Exemplar
a. The sub-group of mss. 8 and 27
b. The sub-group of mss. 4 and 5
c. The sub-group of mss. 22 and 33
d. A Possible English Family of Manuscripts
3. The Group of Manuscripts Dependent upon the Second Parisian University Exemplar
§2. The Isolated Accidents
An Earlier Redaction of QQ. 7 & 8

Manuscript 25 (Paris, BNF, Lat. 15848) and the University Examplars
§1. Manuscript 25 and the First Parisian University Exemplar
§2. Manuscript 25 and the Second Parisian University Exemplar

The First Parisian Exemplar

The Second Parisian University Exemplar

The Reconstruction of the Critical Text

The References and Sources in Quodlibet IV

The Edition of Badius

The Genesis of the Exemplars, Represented by a Diagram

Technique of the Edition

Symbols
1. In the Text Itself
2. In the Critical Apparatus

Abbreviations
1. In the Critical Apparatus
2. In the Apparatus of Citations

Sigla of the Manuscripts

Quodlibet IV
1. Utrum relatio prius sit in divina essentia quam in persona
2. Utrum imago conveniat Spiritui Sancto sicut et Filio
3. Utrum in Christo sint duae reales filiationes, una ad Patrem, alia ad matrem
4. Utrum sint idem re natura et suppositum
5. Utrum unum principium numeri quantitatis discretae sit alterius naturae quam unitas rerum substantialis
6. Utrum forma numeri denarii sit aliquid extra intellectum
7. Utrum intellectus creatus se ipsum et ea quae per essentiam eorum sunt in ipso intelligat per se absque omni specie rei intellectae vel per aliquam speciem eius qua informatur
8. Utrum beatus videns seu intelligens Deum nude per essentiam suam formet in se verbum de Deo
9. Utrum aliquis intellectus creatus ex puris naturalibus possit videre seu intelligere nude divinam essentiam
10. Utrum caritas re differat a gratia
11. Utrum Deus a creatura intellectuali dilectione pura naturali possit diligi super omnia alia
12. Utrum post resurrectionem erunt aliqua individua composita in isto mundo inferiori
13. Utrum in quidditate rerum sensibilium materialium cadunt plures formae substantiales re differentes
14. Utrum in materia sit ratio seminalis, quae est formae inchoatio
15. Utrum forma substantialis recipiat magis et minus
16. Utrum in angelis sit materia, ut debeat dici compositus ex materia et forma
17. Utrum angelus moveatur de loco ad locum
18. Utrum beatus Paulus potuit occidi ante suam conversionem
19. Utrum in isto singulari praedestinato, demonstrato quocumque, sit ratio sive causa suae praedestinationis
20. Utrum bonum sit omnia esse communia in civitate
21. Utrum intellectus coniunctus possit aliquid intelligere
22. Utrum morales virtutes sint in voluntate
23. Utrum iidem habitus sint virtutes, dona, beatitudines et fructus
24. Utrum bona mortificata reviviscant recuperata
25. Utrum caritas aliqua viatoris possit adaequari caritati contemplatoris
26. Utrum liceat mendicantibus petere ultra necessitatem
27. Utrum pro servitio in filio usurarii instruendo liceat sumere pecuniam quam serviens novit acquisitam per usuram
28. Utrum bona communia sint de iure evangelii
29. Utrum alicui liceat repetere debitum cum scandalo
30. Utrum adeptus beneficium per simulationem debeat illud resignare
31. Utrum homo possit esse non risibilis
32. Utrum, in aequali facilitate exsequendi utrumque, homo semper tenetur ad melius faciendum
33. Utrum doctoribus contrariantibus circa aliquod agibilium et agere secundum unam opinionem est sine omni periculo peccati, agere vero secundum aliam est in dubio peccati mortalis, mortaliter peccet ille qui agit illud de quo est dubium an sit peccatum mortale, puta in emendo redditus ad vitam vel accipiendo ultra sortem
34. Utrum peccator paenitens statim tenetur confiteri
35. Utrum religiosus per abbatem suum episcopo praesentatus ad curam et ab episcopo institutus plus debet oboedire abbati revocanti ipsum a cura ad claustrum, an episcopo praecipienti quod in cura sua persistat
36. Utrum species sacramenti Eucharistae nutriant
37. Utrum in sacramentis Novae Legis sit virtus creativa gratiae

Tables
I. Works cited by Henry (and by the editors in the apparatus)
II. Onomastic table
III. Manuscripts cited
IV. Quoted publications
V. Table of contents

Ockham and Scotus and Natural Theology

2012-01-07T23:38:00.002-05:00

Throughout his criticism of Scotus' doctrine of the existence and oneness of God, Ockham remains faithful to his basic philosophical notions, which are radically different from those of the Subtle Doctor. The two theologians do not differ in what they believe about the Christian God, but they diverge on what human reason left to its own resources can prove about him. Ockham finds only "adequate reasons" for affirming his existence - reasons that fall short of strict demonstration. Philosophy assures us of an ultimate ground of the universe: a primary conserving cause or causes, but these might be the heavenly bodies whose causality we experience in our world. Scotus can go further in his rational pursuit of the Christian God because he makes use of a different philosophy, according to which there is real community among beings along with individuality. Ockham fragments the universe into myriad individuals, from which all real community has been eliminated. This leads him to an empirical notion of causality, according to which a cause shares nothing with its effect (except perhaps some of its matter), their bond being simply the recognized presence of effect to cause. As Léon Baudry perceptively remarks, Scotism and Ockhamism are not just two doctrines but two different styles of thinking.

- Maurer, The Philosophy of William of Ockham in the Light of its Principles, 182-183.

I still plan on posting some longer excerpts, but I've been busy over the Christmas season with travels and getting ready for the new semester.

On Unitive Containment

2012-01-04T14:48:00.002-05:00

I came across the following quote in the Reportatio the other day while trying to tease out the intricacies of Scotus' theory of divine ydeas. It is quoted in QQ. in Met. IV q. 2 (OPh IV 355-6) by the editors (though they make transcription and emendation errors).

The title of the question is Utrum imago Trinitatis in anima rationali subsistat in tribus potentiis realiter distinctis is Rep. II d. 16 q. un. (Oxford, Merton College Library, Ms. 61, not foliated/ff. 179v-180r according to the Scotus editors. The following transcription is mine):

De continentia unitiva loquitur Dionysius V De divinis nominibus quia continentia unitiva non est omnino eiusdem ita quod idem omnino contineat se unitive nec esse omnino manentium distincte; requirit ergo unitatem et distinctionem. Est ergo continentia unitiva duplex: uno modo sicut inferius continet superiora essentialia et ibi contenta sunt de essentia continentis sicut eadem est realitas a qua accipitur differentia in albedine et a qua genus proximum ut color et qualitas sensibilis et qualitas et quamquam essent res alie, unitive continentur in albedine. Alia est continentia unitiva quando subiectum unitive continet alia que sunt quasi passiones sicut passiones entis non sunt res alia ab ente quia quecumque detur ipsa, res est ens, vera et bona; ergo ut oportet dicere quod non sunt res alie ab ente vel quod ens non habet passiones reales, quod est contra Aristotelem IV Metaphysice expresse, nec tamen magis sunt tales passiones de essentia nec idem quidditatem quam si essent res alia, ideo non sunt potentie idem formaliter vel quidditative nec inter se nec esse[etiam?] essentie anime nec tamen sunt res alie, sed idem identice. Ideo talia habent talem distinctionem secundum rationes formales qualem haberent realem distinctionem si essent res alie realiter distincte. Principium ergo volendi et intelligendi immediatum est in secundo instanti nature et ista principia sunt unitive in essentia anime que est in primo instanti nature quasi pasiones unitive contente.

[...]

In divinis enim quamquam in supposito sint essentia et relatio et essentia continet relationem, non tamen e contra in proposito; nec intellectus continet voluntatem nec e contra, ideo ista sunt idem idemptice, quia in contente solum, non quia ipsa inter se sunt idem sicut sunt attributa divina non solum idem idemptice sed inter se. Similiter quia quelibet persona in divinis est intrinsece infinita ideo perfecte continet intrinsece quamlibet perfectionem simpliciter que est in alia non sic continet intelligentia memoriam, sed solum concomitantur.

Translation:

Dionysius, V On Divine Names, speaks about unitive containment, that unitive containment is not entirely of the same [thing] so that entirely the same [thing] contains itself unitively, nor is it of things remaining entirely distinct; it requires, therefore, but unity and distinction.

Unitive containment is twofold. In one way, as the inferior contains its essential superiors and there the containment is of the essence of the containing just as it is the same reality from which the difference in whiteness is taken and from which the proximate genus, as color and sensible quality and quality, and although there might be other things unitively contained in whiteness. The other unitive containment is when when a subject unitively contains other things which are quasi attributions/passions just as the attributes of being are not other things than being because whichever one is granted, the thing is being, true and good; therefore either it is necessary to say that they are not other things than being or that being does not have real attributes which is expressly contrary to Aristotle, IV Metaphysics; nevertheless such attributes are not more of the essence nor the same quiddity than if they would be other things. Therefore [the intellect and will] are not formally the same powers or quidditatively, nor between each other nor are they of the essence of the soul nor are they other things [than the soul]; but [they are] the same identically. Therefore such have such a distinction according to their formal definitions of the sort that would have a real distinction if they would be other things really distinct.

[...]

In the divine, although the essence and the relation are in the supposit and the essence contains the relation, nevertheless it is not to be taken contrariwise in the matter at hand; neeither does the intellect contain the will nor contrariwise, therefore they are identically the same, because they are in the containing along, not becuse between them they are the same just as are the divine attributes, not only identically but among each other. Likewise, because whichever of the divine persons is intrinsically infinite therefore perfectly contains every absolute perfection found in another [person]; not so does the intelligence contain the memory, but only accompanies it.

Summary:

Unitive containment is a tool at times employed by Scotus derived directly from pseudo-Dionysius. It is not of the same thing containing itself, nor is it of distinct things remaining completely distinct. Consequently, it requires recourse to both unity and distinction. There are two kinds of unitive containment: one in which an inferior (in the categorical/predicamental line) contains its superior. On this kind, there is a similarity of essence. The second is when the things contained have different essences, and these essences remain formally distinct from each other and from whatever does the containing.

A Definition of Scholasticism

2012-01-02T23:25:00.001-05:00

From L. M. de Rijk. Scholasticism is an

“approach, which is characterized by the use, in both study and teaching, of a constantly recurring system of concepts, distinctions, proposition analyses, argumentative techniques and disputational methods.”[i]

[i] L.M. de Rijk, Middeleeuwse wijsbegeerte: Traditie en vernieuwing, 2nd edn. (Assen/Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1988), 25.

Quoted here.

Hauerwas on Univocity

2012-01-02T14:20:00.001-05:00

A fascinating quote from Tracy Rowland's article in the Oxford Handbook of the Trinity, p. 590.

Modernity, drawing on the metaphysics of a transcendent god, was the attempt to be historical without Christ. Postmodernity, facing the agony of living in history with no end, is the denial of history. In the wake of such a denial, the only remaining comfort is the shopping mall, which gives us the illusion of creating histories through choice, thus hiding from us the reality that none of us can avoid having our lives determined by money. Money, in modernity, is the institutionalization of the univocity of being that Scotus thought necessary to ensure the unmediated knowledge of God.

This from a god of this age. I suppose such comments aren't worth responding to, as this just more of the same drivel we've seen many times from the pomo crowd. So just one brief comment: Scotus did not argue for univocity in order to guarantee the unmediated knowledge of God. "Unmediated" knowledge would be the direct vision of the divine essence had by the blessed in the next life. Univocity is a property of terms or concepts used in syllogistic discourse. What Scotus was actually trying to do was to avoid fallacies of equivocation when making theological arguments in this life.

Marilyn Adams on History of Philosophy

2011-12-30T13:32:00.001-05:00

From the Dewey lecture, "God and Evil among the Philosophers", in the APA proceedings and Addresses vol. 85 issue 2. Emphases are in the original

Certainly, medieval scholastics were analytic philosophers: they were distinction-drawers and argument-inventers par excellence. But they were not only generalists (ranging over all of the major sub-fields of philosophy) in the way Pike recommended; they were systematic philosophers. To get a grip on what they were saying about omniscience or omnipotence or perfect goodness required a wider understanding of their metaphysics and epistemology, their conceptions of agency and normative grounds, and of how they fitted these together.

Working on my Ockham book, I became convinced that their theological disagreements were rooted in philosophical differences, which were at bottom contentious. Most of their arguments for their own and against their opponent's positions involved premises to which the other would not consent. Although they were as interested as Pike was in analyzing whether Divine foreknowledge is incompatible with free will, they did not see themselves engaged in a meta-discipline, but in theory construction. They were beginning with doctrinal givens and philosophical commitments and working in different ways to integrate these into a philosophically coherent system. Their debates forced refinements in their own theories. Together they furnished detailed maps of theoretical alternatives.

Throughout my studies of medieval philosophical theology, I have remained a metaphysical realist about philosophical claims: there is such a thing as Reality with a capital "R" and well-formed theories either do or do not correspond with it. But refereeing their philosophical disputes, I became a sceptical realist, holding that it is impossible for us to prove in a way convincing to every rational person, which theory is true and which false. The philosophical task ought to concentrate on theoretical development and understanding.

It also struck me that scholastic method was an antidote for dogmatism. True, there were theological givens that medieval scholastics had to number among the phenomena to be saved. But questioning and disputing required each to get inside the other's theory enough to understand its strengths and weaknesses, the better to appreciate the plusses and minuses of their own. Such exercises foster intellectual flexibility and imagination that is able to do comparative anatomy and cost-benefit analyses on philosophical competitors and to recognize that the same problem can be solved in different ways. When, over the years, colleagues and graduate students have murmured that history of philosophy isn't really philosophy, my contrary reply has become that history of philosophy is a way of doing philosophy and wholesome medicine against the dogmatism that sometimes plagues our field.

In my generation, we by and large changed the way history of philosophy is done by philosophers trained in the analytic tradition. There is a spectrum of practice. Some do philology and edit texts. More spend time on the institutional settings and wider intellectual milieu in which past philosophers worked. There are those who focus more on the interpretive and philosophical problems found in the texts themselves, while others move on from this to build bridges to contemporary thought. All of these are important. Whatever one's specialty, one has to learn from them all. My own work on Ockham benefitted enormously from the generosity of the editorial team at the Franciscan Institute, where critical texts of Ockham's works, discoveries and perspectives, and hospitality were shared. Anachronism and mis-readings are to some extent inevitable. My own advice is to resist attempts to take the weirdness out of great past philosophers. Letting them be as weird as they are is the way to guarantee that we learn something that we didn't know before.

Anglo-American analytic philosophy borrowed its sense of the philosophical canon from Oxbridge: ancient and modern classical, at least Plato and Aristotle, at least Descartes, maybe Leibniz, certainly Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. During the seventies and eighties, Kant was re-entering the mainstream. Medieval philosophy has been central to the canon of philosophy in Roman Catholic schools since 1880 when Pope Leo XIII declared Aquinas the patron of the Catholic schools. Fortunately for me, a tradition of covering medieval philosophy had begun at UCLA when Ernest Moody, the famous pioneer in the study of medieval logic, joined the philosophy faculty in the late fifties and helped launch the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. In leading analytic graduate departments, however, medievalists were and still are rare.

My generation failed to secure a place for medieval philosophy within the canon of analytic philosophy, but not for want of trying. In the late seventies, the quality of medieval sessions at the APA had sunk so low, that we specialists formed the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, which has since mounted its own double sessions (one on the Latin west and the other on Jewish and Arabic philosophy) at divisional meetings. This was good advertising: the Middle Ages was too a period during which real philosophy was done! The Society also built bridges between secular non-catholic and Roman Catholic schools and widened the circle around which work was shared. These were significant fruits. Certainly, I have learned a lot about Aquinas from Catholic Neo-Thomists, who have spent their adult lives steeping themselves in his works. Over the course of my career, more and more works have been edited and translated with the result that most professionals now know: Augustine and Aquinas were not the only philosophers between Aristotle and Descartes! But medieval philosophy is every bit as technical as contemporary metaphysics is. I suspect many think it would be too much trouble to master it. More's the pity, because medieval philosophy is full of distinctive insights and theories in metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of language, and philosophical theology, overall a fascinating diet of contrasting ideas.

Analytic Philosophy Reconceived: Studying medieval philosophy not only acquainted me with content to analyze; it gradually brought about an imitative shift in my own method. Medieval philosophical theologians were not practicing a meta-discipline; they were involved in theory-construction. By the early to mid-seventies, however, analytic philosophy was recovering its sense of vocation to theorize as well. Hilary Putnam revived talk of natural kinds. Saul Kripke made de re necessities and mind-body dualism respectable. David Lewis' clear and penetrating discussions lent further credibility to the enterprise of metaphysics. Philosophy of mind went inter-disciplinary with the rise of cognitive psychology, and diversified with many and various materialist theories of the mind. Philosophy of language forged ties with linguistics. Enriched conceptual machinery from the present and retrievals from the past made it increasingly natural for me to see the project of philosophy of religion in terms of theory-construction, of articulating theological claims using philosophical conceptuality, of arguing for them--at least in part--on philosophical grounds, of adjusting concepts and theses to achieve theoretical coherence. Such a shift blurs the boundaries between philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. In fact, my own methodological turns were part of a trend that spawned a significant movement: the Society of Christian Philosophers.

Read the Original - If You Can

2011-12-27T10:00:00.000-05:00

Translated sources attract errors just as translated scriptures foment heresies, and when the inexperienced attempt their own translations, the results can be even worse.

Although it is off thetopic of this blog, the review from which the quotation above was taken may be of interest. It exposes recent amateurish histories of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and John Cabot--all explorers of the New World. The critique has distinct similarities to critiques foundhere of amateurish theologians who attempt a coherent historical narrative of "how we got here" withoutbothering to read the original sources. The problem is similar for both groups: pastry-makers posing as scholars convince others by the tastiness of their concoctions. The author concludes his book review:

I could multiply the dispiriting litany of errors, but it is more interesting to try to understand what drives these writers to parade their inadequacies in the marketplace. It is tempting to blame postmodernism, which has blurred the difference between drivel and truth; or the popularity of television-history, where no standards of veracity or scholarship apply; or the temptations aroused by vulgar sensationalists, who have made fortunes by proclaiming the peripeties of the Holy Grail and "proving" that the medieval Chinese discovered Rhode Island. I suspect, however, that the very virtues of my discipline are responsible for the vices of the writers who abuse it. Because history is the people's discipline, books about it are relatively salable—invitingly so, to indolent cupidity. History's accessibility to non-specialists makes it seem dangerously, delusively easy.

Academic historians tend to welcome recruits from other ranks, like owls nurturing cuckoos, and applaud the intrusions of neophytes with a glee that physicians, say, would never show for faith-healers or snake-oil salesmen. I am afraid it is time for historians to wipe the smiles from our jaws and start biting back. If escape from the poverty of your own imagination is your reason for exploiting the stories history offers, or if you are taking refuge from another discipline in the belief that history is easy, without bothering to do the basic work, you will deserve to fail.

--Felipe Fernández-Armesto

more Latin scans online

2011-12-23T16:18:00.002-05:00

Anticipating disappointment with your Christmas gift? Looking for more Latin texts but short on cash? Your family doesn't know the difference between Roger Bacon and Francis Bacon and wants you to bring home the bacon? Look no further for a holiday munus legitimum, provided you have sufficient bandwidth and hard drive capabilities.

Two extremely useful sites for scans of Latin texts, especially those regarding scholastic philosophy from the Medieval period onward:

VIRTUAL LIBRARY: DIGITIZED BOOKS

AN ANALYTIC BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ON-LINE NEO-LATIN TEXTS

For each link, the readers of this blog may notice the works of a number of Scotistic Franciscans and certain Dominicans who opposed them. And Suarez is there to boot.

Stocking stuffers:

a short op-ed on Christmas he-haw: "Even Christians Taking Christ out of Christmas"
and "Confessions of a One-Season Santa"

New Doctor

2011-12-15T10:24:00.001-05:00

There is going to be a new Doctor of the Church. Scotus? No, Hildegard. Huh. Apparently Albert was also declared doctor before being canonized. So there is no reason why Scotus couldn't be as well. So why hasn't he? Oh right, thanks radical orthodoxy, Brad Gregory, Fr. Robert Barron, 99% of Catholic intellectuals.

A Ramble on Ockham, Scholarship, and Other Matters

2011-12-15T08:43:00.006-05:00

The other day I mentioned that I'd been reading Armand Maurer's The Philosophy of William of Ockham in the Light of Its Principles. I picked it up last week and have read about a third of it so far.

Now, Maurer's book isn't a replacement for or a competitor to Marilyn Adams' William Ockham, which must be one of the most impressive books on mediaeval philosophy of the last fifty years. At almost 1,400 pages, Adams' book is more than twice the length of Maurer's; it's enormously detailed and enormously comprehensive; it treats a vast range of arguments in precise detail, not only Ockham's, but those of many of Ockham's interlocutors and influences, including Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, Scotus, Chatton, Aureol, etc. Anyone who wants a good introduction to post-Thomistic philosophy and doesn't need it gentle would do well to study Adams' book carefully, together with John Wippel's The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines: A Study in Late Thirteenth-Century Philosophy. (By the way, as long as I'm throwing out generalized recommendations, if you'd like to round out your education, gentle reader, you should pair these books with John F. Quinn's massive The Historical Constitution of Bonaventure's Philosophy, which is however unfortunately very difficult to obtain. I don't have a copy, but I worked my way through it while writing the old dissertation.)

There are, however, problems with Adams' book. For one thing, did I mention that it's freakin' huge? It takes some real stamina. I'll admit that I didn't finish it. When I was taking Timothy Noone's course on Ockham in grad school I started reading it, but about two-thirds in to the book and the semester, I stopped. It's not just the size, but the size combined with the presentation. Adams writes the kind of anglo-analytic scholastic stuff that I've never found very palatable, medieval arguments presented with a heavy 20th century veneer: lists of numbered propositions and labelled arguments, variables with subscripts and superscripts, occasional modern notation, etc. This is not necessarily bad in principle: Scotus himself used some of these techniques (he and Ockham have good claims to be the first real anglo-analytic philosophers, if the term implies an English-speaking origin, preoccupation with logic, linguistic analysis, a highly compressed (for Scotus) or lucid (for Ockham) style as opposed to a florid or elaborate one (like Henry's or Bonaventure's)), apparently for his own convenience, since it does not make him easier to read. But Adams uses them, presumably, for the convenience of and to appeal to a mid-20th-century mainstream analytic audience. This limits the book in some ways, since for a broader audience, continentals or people like me who are actually more familiar with the scholastic tradition than the 20th-century one, understanding Ockham through Adams sometimes means having to mentally re-translate her modernizations back into something like what Ockham might have really said. It's a little like a Latin trying to read Aristotle as translated and commented on by the Arabs - much better than nothing, for sure, but of course you'd rather have it straight from the Greek. And it's a real question whether the mainstream analytic tradition, not used to thinking in medieval patterns, will care enough about any scholastic thinker to master a book like Adams'. I'm afraid the whole Adams-Stump-Kretzmann-Kenny etc. project of dragging medieval philosophy into the mid-20th-century has been more or less a failure, given the fact that contemporary philosophy has moved on without really assimilating their work, making their books targeted at an audience that is fast ceasing to exist and so dated in a way that many books by the likes of Gilson or Maritain or Yves Simon aren't.

In any case, I was talking about Maurer. His book on Ockham may be no substitute for Adams', but in many ways I'm liking it better. It's extremely well written, very clear and even enjoyable. There's a huge amount of erudition behind it - Maurer has clearly mastered the corpus of Ockham's writings and the secondary literature - but I find the presentation clean, uncluttered, and very intelligible. Maurer's writing in English but he presents Ockham as a medieval, not as a modern anglo-philosopher in disguise. He's light on his feet, which is a pleasing contrast to some other scholars whose projects are similar. I'm thinking for instance of Wippel, whom respect and filial piety (he was one of my teachers and on my dissertation committee) forbid me to criticize too harshly. His (fairly few) books are magisterial and indispensable. But The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being is not exactly fun to read.

Maurer is not writing a really comprehensive survey, but as his title indicates, is seeking to understand the various facets of Ockham's thought as reflected in his few basic principles. The first part of the book treats these principles in themselves, with two long chapters on "Logic and Reality" and "Philosophy and Theology" which provide a very good summation of the central stances of Ockhamism. The second and third parts are about the application of these principles to God and Creatures respectively. Maurer presents Ockham without espousing Ockhamism, as he indicates in his introduction, but extremely fairly and straightforwardly, with only the very occasional criticism or caveat.

I'll post a longish excerpt soon, but right now I want to notice something Maurer says in the prefatory blurb right at the beginning of the book:

Martin Heidegger once declared, "Every thinker thinks but one single thought." The original and focal point of Ockham's thought is the singular or individual thing (res singularis), as common nature (natura communis) is the central conception of Scotism and the act of existing (esse) is of Thomism. With Ockham the traditional conjugations of being come to signify the thing itself in its ineluctable unity.

With all due respect to Heidegger, I'm not so sure about this. No doubt some thinkers can be reduced to one single central thought, but I have my doubts about both Aquinas and Scotus. Certainly some modern Thomists have acted as though all of Thomism depended on his doctrine of esse, but there's a lot more to Thomas himself than that. In fact when I think of Thomas what primarily strikes me is a certain kind of order which sets him apart from his competitors (recall his remarks about order in the first chapter of Summa contra gentiles). St Bonaventure is another extremely orderly thinker, but Bonaventure's sense of order is artistic and graceful, where Thomas' is schematic and pedagogical. Not for nothing is Thomas the patron of teachers. He excels at being able to talk intelligently about everything, and above all to produce the sense that everything fits. This is why Thomism gets compared to a Gothic cathedral. It's huge, it's varied, the variety is subordinated to a single great design. On the other hand the range of issues that Scotus or Bonaventure deal with is more restricted. Bonaventureanism is less like a cathedral and more like a fantastically illuminated manuscript.

It's more fair, however, to say that esse is an "original and focal point" for Thomas than it is to say that the common nature is for Scotus. That just strikes me as wrong. Scotus' mind does not evince either Bonaventurean or Thomistic order: opening his books frequently produces the sensation of falling into a profound but chaotic abyss of insight. His method is not systematic and his thought is not easily systematizable. Vos' book The Philosophy of John Duns Scotus tries to reduce it to some semblance of order by orienting his achievement around some central conceptual accomplishments, like synchronic contingency, but with in my opinion very limited success. The common nature is, of course, very important for Scotus, but the notion of the irreducible individual is no less so - in fact the Scotist insistence on the primacy of the individual is in my opinion one of its great strengths over Thomism. Haecceities, the formal distinction, intrinsic modes, essentially ordered causes, and many other distinctively Scotist ideas work together in a complex and delicate balance in which no one of them takes priority over the others and all are fitted into a more general Aristotelean substrate from which they only emerge as needed in the particular instance. There are certain basic Thomistic notions which Aquinas deploys over and over again in a hundred contexts with almost monotonous regularity - esse, the real distinction of being and essence, immateriality or separability from matter, etc. - in a way that Scotus doesn't. If Thomas' thought is like a cathedral, Scotus' is like a piece of enormously complex polyphony sung over a drone of Aristotelianism and a cantus firmus of revelation. You can't grasp it all at once because it's essentially developmental and progressive. You can't reduce it to a leitmotif because the various melodic themes arise when needed by the music as a whole in one or another voice, and the importance is less in any particular voice or theme than in their fugal interplay. What's happening now depends on what happened in the debate a moment ago more than on the demands of some architectonic conceptual structure.

All this rhapsodizing is, of course, taking us away from Ockham again. For Ockham I do think it's fair to say, as our own Ockham said the other day, "It seems Ockham took a handful [of] basic and already established principles then applied them relentlessly and consistently in places they had never been applied before." But if Ockham's strength is to show what happens when you join genius and fearless persistence to such a technique, damn the consequences, it would be a mistake to assume that other thinkers are trying less successfully to do the same thing.

As I noted, in a while I'll post a lengthy excerpt from Maurer's book. I may also say something soon about the other book I bought at the same time and am reading simultaneously with it, Sokolowski's Phenomenology of the Human Person, which I'm enjoying very much.

Scotus' Razor

2011-12-12T10:05:00.004-05:00

From The Extremely Subtle Questions on the Books of Metaphysics of Aristotle, Book VIII, Q.1, n.22:

Aliter dicitur ad quaestionem quod paucitas semper est ponenda quando per ipsam salvantur apparentia . . . Et ideo positio plurium semper debet dicere necessitatem manifestam propter quam ponantur tot; nihil autem apparet in accidentibus propter quod debeant poni composita ex duabus partibus essentialibus, communiter loquendo . . .Ideo communiter negatur talis compositio.

"Otherwise it should be said to the question [which is whether accidents are simple or composite] that we should always posit fewer things when the appearances can be saved thereby . . . therefore in positing more things we should always indicate the manifest necessity on account of which so many things are posited. But there is no apparent reason why accidents should be taken to be composed of two essential parts, commonly speaking . . . therefore such composition is commonly denied."

Scotus is a big fan of what has come to be called Ockham's Razor. Of course we find it in Aquinas too, for instance in Summa theologiae Pars 1 q.2 a.3.1: quod potest compleri per pauciora principia, non fit per plura, what can be accomplished with fewer principles doesn't happen through more. The origins of the Razor go back to Aristotle and his insight that nature does nothing in vain. It was commonly known to the scholastics, but Scotus was particularly fond of invoking it. Why then is it so associated with Ockham rather than Scotus? Is it that Scotus balances it with a judicious use of the Anti-Razor, keeping a full toolkit and insisting that we not deny more entities when they are necessary to explain the appearances, whereas Ockham uses his fewer tools more ostentatiously and vigorously?

This is, of course, the self-serving scotist interpretation. The issue has been on my mind, however, since I've been reading Armand Maurer's fine book The Philosophy of William of Ockham in the Light of His Principles. I'll say something about it here soon.

Robert Prentice and Illuminationism

2011-12-11T09:51:00.000-05:00

Since we have gotten back onto the topic of narratives of late, I offer one from Robert Prentice. Now in the current common opinion of Thomists, Historians, Theologians, and Philosophers, before Scotus there was a nice, warm, caring, generally happy golden age of participation-analogical metaphysics that the Bible, Fathers, Doctors, and the common man on the street singing his troubadour songs all held in common. Then the evil univocalist onto-theology was introduced by Duns Scotus, which created the "secular". Contrast this with:

Robert P. Prentice, An Anonymous Question on the Unity of the Concept of Being (Attributed to Scotus), p. 109 n. 6:

Platonism, Neo-platonism, Gnosticism, all incorporated some form of divine illuminationism within their systems. The theory of reminiscence, e.g. in Plato, is basically an expression of the idea that the divine world is the proximate source of true intelligibility and personal possession of truth. Aristotle's theory that the agent intellect performs the work of illuminating the sense world to render it an intelligible one is actually an extension of Plato's reminiscense theory by explaining the 'mechanics' of how reminiscence could take place, as one can discern by the reading of chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Book III of Aristotle's De anima. Moreover, there is not lacking a sense in which chapter 5 can be interpreted in which the Agent Intellect is a divine agency existing separately from men, which performs the function of "intelligibilizing" the sensible world after the manner of the God of reminiscence. It is then understandable that with St. Augustine, still processing reality in the Neo-platonist mould, a Christianized version of the reminiscence theory and of the agent intellect should surface in Christian illuminationism. It is then psychically comprehensible that the illuminationism of Augustinianism became factually involved with the substance of the faith itself. Hence when the conscious manifestation of the "pagan" psychic roots of the seemingly Christian theory of illuminationism was brought to the attention of the then current scholasticism by means of the "strange" theories of Averroes who posited that there was an Active or Agent Intellect existing apart from man, an understandable conflict between the unconscious cultural formation and the surfacing higher conscious rationality should take place. It is only in this sense that one can find a proportional answer to the violence of the doctrinal controversies turning around the agent intellect during the dozen or so years incorporating the condemnations of 1270 and 1277 of the Latin Averroism of Siger of Brabant. When one examines some of the 13 theses condemined in 1270 and, above all, some of the 219 condemned in 1277 by Stephen Tempier, Bishop of Paris, in the name of the Christian faith, one must look elsewhere than in the faith for the explanation of the particular condemnations. The whole conflict was a result of an emerging conscious secularized vision of reality detached from the illuminationism rooted in Hellenized Platonism pitted against the threatened unconscious attachment to an entrenched cultural vision. In a definite sense, St. Thomas' tract De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas represents a historical step in the process of the desacralization of knowledge.

Brad Gregory's New Book

2011-12-07T13:16:00.005-05:00

You remember Brad Gregory, Notre Dame's golden boy. Well he has a new book out. Generating lots of buzz, probably awards in the offiing. But it doesn't look like he learned his lession. Here's a quote from the introduction, p.5, of The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

Finally, until Funkenstein's Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (1986), no one would have suspected any connection between late medieval metaphysics and contemporary neo-Darwinian atheism. But the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions of modern science and of antireligious, scientistic ideologies are clearly indebted to the emergence of metaphysical univocity that Funkenstein identified in medieval scholasticism beginning with John Duns Scotus.

Some more from his 2009 Logos article:

Funkenstein showed both that there was a deep affinity between theology and science among major intellectual figures in the seventeenth century and why this symbiosis proved fleeting: the underlying ontology— God “is” just like creation “is”—meant that God had to beat a progressive retreat as science explained more and more about the natural world. Scotus’s initial move is anything but an arcane curiosity from the distant past because it led through an unanticipated series of intellectual developments that include the scientific revolution, Isaac Newton’s physics and post-Newtonian deism, Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics and his sharp distinction between phenomena and noumena, the philosophical framework of nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism, and eventually the neo-Darwinian, scientistic atheism of the New Atheists.

And it turns out that Scotus believed in a different God than did the Biblical authors, Church Fathers, Aquinas, and millions of Christian lay people.

Well, of course, it will be argued—what “other” ontological framework could there be? One in which God is not conceptually domesticated, but is rather regarded as radically distinct from and noncompetitive with his creation, as the traditional doctrine of creation ex nihilo implies.

[...]

God conceptualized in this manner is not an “entity or being” at all; he cannot be conceived or visualized; he cannot be represented directly in any human categories whatsoever, whether visual, verbal, or conceptual. This is the same God written about with acuity by contemporary Catholic philosophers such as Robert Sokolowski and theologians such as Robert Barron. This is the same God in whom faithful Catholics believe today, whatever their level of explicit philosophical or theological awareness (my ninety-five-year-old grandmother, with her eighth-grade education, believes in, worships, and prays to this God).

We really ought to take away all that NEH money for the edition, burn all works of Scotus, and excommunicate anyone who says his name aloud. Because in the end, we all know that Aquinas was right about everything (except the immaculate conception...).

Update:

In leafing through Funkenstein's book, I came across a discussion of univocity on p. 26 that claims that existence is a divine attribute for Scotus (assuming, like the Thomists, that Scotus holds the same view on essence and existence as Aquinas). He cites as his proof for this and univocity generally the spurious Expositio in Metaphysicam, known since at least the 1920's to be spurious. But Funkenstein, like Brad Gregory, is an historian, which means they don't need to worry about such matters.

So it looks like the intellectual giants of our time are agreed and we have a common opinion: Scotistic univocity is bad and is the root of all evil in the world, and we know this because of all its bad effects on society. It is in fact so obviously bad and stoopid we do not need to make a single argument against it. Thus say the philosophers, theologians, and historians of our time.

Ocham on Vallicella and Scotus on Future Contingents

2011-11-30T22:21:00.002-05:00

Our friend Ocham has a good post which includes a bit of Scotus on two different ways of referring to future contingents. He translates the following passage:

It must be understood that a proposition about the future can be understood to signify something in the future in two ways. So that the proposition about the future signifies it to be true now that something in the future will have to be true [verum esse habebit] (for example, that ‘you will be white at a’ signifies it now to be in reality so that at time a you will be white). Or it can be understood that it signifies now that you will be white then: not that it signifies that it is now such that then you are going to be white, but that it signifies now that then you will be white. For to signify it to be [the case] now that you will be white at a, signifies more than to signify that you will be white at a.

So Scotus notes two possible ways of talking about the future:

1) I say what the future is determined to be: "It is now true that tomorrow you will be white".

2) I say something determinate about the future, which at the moment is indeterminate: "I am now saying that tomorrow you will be white", even if what is true now is that tomorrow you may be white or you may be red.

Saying that I think that things will turn out so-and-so is not the same thing as saying that there is something in reality now which determines that in the future things will be so-and-so, but that I think that, when the causal determinators determine how things turn out, they will end up making things so-and-so rather than such-and-such.

And we have to distinguish between statements like:

a) "In three years grass will still be green"

and

b) "In three years Obama will still be President of the U.S".

(a) is in one sense a future contingent. It may turn out in three years that there is no more grass, or that there is a massive drought and all the grass is yellow or brown. But "grass is green" will still be true in the sense that greenness will still belong to the essence of grass, even if no existing grass can actualize that essential property due to accidental circumstances. (a) is really not a statement about a given moment or time period at all, but a statement about the nature of grass, which is invariant across all the times in which grass exists in its normal state. It's analogous to "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet", which taken by itself is not so much about nomenclature as about horticulture.

But (b) is different. Obama's being President will be a purely contingent fact, since it is not in the nature of anything for that to be the case, but will be due only to the aggregate of choices voters will by then have made. So when I (as I would if I were a pundit) say that Obama will or will not be President after the next election, I'm saying that I think most voters will end up making a certain choice; I'm not saying that (since the truth about the future is determinate) there will be no choices, or that they have already made their choices. Rather, every such projection carries with it the implicit caveat, "If current trends continue . . ."

Deep Thoughts from a Neuroscientist

2011-11-23T10:34:00.000-05:00

I think we will get over the idea of free will and and accept we are a special kind of machine, one with a moral agency which comes from living in social groups. This perspective will make us ask new kinds of questions.

Link to Neuroscientist Gazzaniga's interview.

Discuss

The New Scotist Commission

2011-11-22T14:23:00.001-05:00

Besides Richard Rufus, another group was awarded a NEH grant to produce medieval critical editions: the new Scotist commission. It will be based at Notre Dame and will edit the Opera Parisiensis of Duns Scotus. Here is the press release from the Notre Dame website.

Gerard of Bologna on Divine Ideas

2011-11-21T10:39:00.000-05:00

Mostly a note for myself.

From Xiberta, De scriptoribus scholasticis saeculi XIV ex ordine Carmelitarum, p. 101-102:

Not clear what he is citing, either Quod. I q. 8 or Summa q. 26

Essentia absoluta contentiva omnium creaturarum, ratione cuius dicitur exemplar et paradigma. Divina essentia est illud absolutum quod est idea et exemplar, in quo inspiciuntur creaturae omnes et omnes conditiones et proprietates et habitudines earum ad invicem tamquam in unico perfectissimo repraesentativo omnium. Et sic accipiendo nomen ideae, non est nisi unica idea; sed accipiendo ideam pro respectu consequente, sic sunt ideae multae.

Richard Rufus of Cornwall

2011-11-16T10:27:00.000-05:00

An article on Richard Rufus of Cornwall

Some choice quotes:

Richard Rufus of Cornwall may be the most important figure in Western philosophy you’ve never heard of. A project based at Indiana University and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities aims to change that.

“Still, if we want to learn how the Western university curriculum was shaped, we need to know the works of Richard Rufus, works that were entirely lost between 1350 and 1950 and which are just now beginning to be published,” Wood said. “The importance of the project explains why the NEH has supported the project with modest funding for more than a decade.”

“Indiana University proudly partners with the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of basic research in the humanities,” said Sarita Soni, IU Bloomington vice provost for research. “Without critical editions such as those that the NEH supports, higher-level interpretative scholarship and teaching would lack a solid foundation. We take special pride in the research accomplishments of our entire faculty, so we are particularly pleased when exceptional achievements such as Dr. Wood’s are recognized nationally.”

Rufus is the earliest Western philosopher whose commentaries on Aristotle’s Metaphysics and natural sciences are known to have survived. He played a key role in the transformation of philosophy and theology as a university lecturer in Paris and Oxford between 1231 and 1255. When Rufus began lecturing, the university curriculum focused only on the liberal arts, and the teaching of Aristotle’s Metaphysics or his natural philosophy was forbidden. Within two decades, the libri naturales were required reading, and all students were examined on them.

These works established the foundations of philosophy and were fundamental to Western science — without the translations and commentaries in the 13th century, “not only would medieval science have failed to materialize, but the scientific revolution of the 17th century could hardly have occurred,” wrote IU Distinguished Professor Emeritus Edward Grant.

Rufus not only restated Aristotle’s arguments for his contemporaries, but he also frequently challenged them, Wood said. In so doing he influenced the great Scholastic philosophers who followed him. His influence can be seen in Roger Bacon and Bonaventure on cosmology, in Albert the Great’s theory of universals, and in John Duns Scotus’ account of individuation.

Errantry

2011-11-15T11:26:00.003-05:00

I have the character defect (not too rare, perhaps) of, whatever I am or ought to be doing, wishing I were doing something else - even when what I am or ought to be doing is something I very much want to do. Throughout school I had this problem: whatever I was studying, I wanted to study something else. When I was supposed to be learning calculus I was reading Thomists. When I was supposed to be studying Greek and French I was teaching myself Latin on the side.

Now that I'm in school not as a student but as a teacher this fault hasn't gone away. Last week I was teaching Hume's Enquiry, but Hume got me thinking of other British Empiricists I'd loved and lost, and I ended up rereading Berkeley's Dialogues of Hylas and Philonous instead of focussing on class preparation. This week it's Kant's Prolegomena, and I find myself feeling the pull, which I haven't felt in a very long time, of the Critique of Pure Reason.

{Autobiographical Interlude}

Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant were the first serious philosophy books I ever read, back as a fifteen-year-old novice. I might have glanced at a little Plato first, but I don't recall. Until then the extent of my philosophy had been largely C.S. Lewis and various things along the lines of Francis Schaeffer. At fifteen I hoarded my pennies until I could afford to buy a set of the 1952 edition of the Britannica Great Books. I read here and there as inclination and ability led me, but I knew I wanted to get to the philosophy. As I say, I don't recall how much Plato I looked at, but it couldn't have been much. A short acquaintance showed that Aristotle and Aquinas were too hard to start with, and I thought I'd look at the English thinkers. The Locke-Berekely-Hume volume was just right.

On the whole these guys weren't a bad place to start philosophy. Their great advantage is that they are very good and clear writers, a fact I've come to appreciate more and more after spending so much of my subsequent years with either Germans or scholastics. I read the empiricists avidly but never felt taken in by them. I couldn't at the time put my finger on where they were going wrong but I felt sure they must be; nevertheless my appetite was whetted. They incited my curiosity without settling my opinions or even my inclinations. When in the Introduction to his Principles of Human Knowledge Berkeley said

It were an endless as well as an useless thing to trace the Schoolmen, those great masters of abstraction, through all the manifold inextricable labyrinths of error and dispute which their doctrine of abstract natures and notions seems to have led them into

he didn't dissuade me from doing so myself. It turns out that following the schoolmen through their labyrinths - of error sometimes, of dispute always, of wisdom, I hope, occasionally - is indeed an endless thing, but not, I have found, a useless one. When at the end of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Hume said

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact or existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion

I didn't take his advice. My volumes of divinity and school metaphysics have multiplied a hundredfold since then. But it was a start.

I have to confess that I didn't read Kant next because he was the logical step after Hume, but for a much stupider reason. Nickelodeon used to show a cartoon called "Rocko's Modern Life", and in one episode Rocko discovers that his friend, who he had always considered a dim bulb, is actually a prodigy. He visits his friend's house to find him reading the Critique of Pure Reason, decides that he can't be bested by his friend, and goes home to read it himself, resulting in an amusing montage of mental anguish and existential horror (this is how I remember the episode; it's been more than fifteen years). I took this as a challenge and started to read the Critique myself. Kant daunted me as it daunted Rocko - I had to take notes to follow the argument, the first time I had done that with a book, and I didn't finish it - but I took it as a challenge to come back to.

Of course, speaking of challenges to come back to, thinking of the possibility of picking up the Critique reminds me that I never did finish Hegel's Phenomenology. We spent many weeks reading sections of it my senior year in college, and at the time it didn't leave me wanting more. Some years after that it was the only book on my comprehensive reading lists in graduate school that I didn't finish. Last year I bought a commentary on it by my favorite undergraduate teacher, thinking that he if anyone would teach me to love Hegel as he deserves, but the commentary has so far gone as unfinished as its commentatum.

* * *

So, reading the opening sections of the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics is filling me with an irrational desire to read Hegel side by side with a 500-page commentary. I think I'll manage to hold out for now. But I do the same thing with literature. Earlier this summer I was rereading The Canterbury Tales. I took a break to read The Faerie Queene for the third time, and when I was done, instead of going back to Chaucer, I've instead gone back to a series of Icelandic sagas. Right now I'm in the middle of a translation of Njalssaga which is more literally faithful than the last one I read, so I'm enjoying it. But I confess that I'm taking a break from it in order to read The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, a little book that I find improves with age. I've decided just now that the third poem, "Errantry", is an allegory of the philosophical life, and it includes an episode on the hero's attempt to win love and reward from that harsh mistress Academia:

He sat and sang a melody,
his errantry a tarrying,
he begged a pretty butterfly,
that fluttered by to marry him.
She scorned him and she scoffed at him,
she laughed at him unpitying,
so long he studied wizardry,
and sigaldry and smithying.

It turns out that the pursuit, like so many pursuits, is just a distraction. The butterfly squanders his gifts and falls to bitter quarreling; the hero abandons her and looks elsewhere, but in his journeying and tourneying forgets his message and his errand. I need to beware of distractions. The real thing is the study - the wizardry and sigaldry and smithying.

Thomas Aquinas on Kinds of Sleep

2011-11-14T13:30:00.000-05:00

hora est iam nos de somno surgere. Rom 13:11
Now is the hour for us to rise from sleep.

Quod quidem intelligendum est non de somno naturae, qui quandoque dicitur mors, secundum illud I Thess. IV, 12: nolumus vos ignorare de dormientibus, quandoque autem est quies animalium virtutum, secundum illud Io. XI, v. 12: si dormit, salvus erit. Nec enim intelligendum est de somno gratiae, qui quandoque dicitur quies aeternae gloriae, secundum illud Ps. IV, 9: in pace in idipsum, etc., quandoque autem est quies contemplationis etiam in hac vita. Cant. V, 2: ego dormio, et cor meum vigilat. Sed intelligitur de somno culpae, secundum illud Eph. V, 14: exurge, qui dormis, et exurge a mortuis, etc., vel etiam negligentiae, secundum illud Prov. c. VI, 9: usquequo, piger, dormies? Tempus ergo est surgendi a somno culpae per poenitentiam Ps. CXXVI, 2: surgite, postquam sederitis, etc., a somno vero negligentiae per sollicitudinem bene operandi Is. XXI, 5: surgite, principes, accipite clypeum. Eccli. XXXII, 15: hora surgendi non te tristet. Deinde, cum dicit nunc enim, etc., assignat rationem eius quod dixerat, dicens nunc enim propior est salus nostra, quam cum credidimus. Quod quidem secundum intentionem apostoli intelligitur de salute vitae aeternae, de qua dicitur Is. LI, 8: salus autem mea in sempiternum erit.

This certainly is not [said of] the sleep of nature, which in some places is called death, as in 1 Thess 4:12: "we do not wish you to be ignorant of those who have fallen asleep," but which in other places is the sleep of animal powers, as in John 11:12, "if he sleeps, he will be well." Nor is it to be understood [to speak] about the sleep of grace, which in some places is the of eternal glory, as in Ps 4:9: "in peace, in the selfsame I will sleep," but which is sometimes the rest of contemplation even in this life, as in Song of Songs 5:2: "I sleep, but my heart keeps vigil."

But it is to be understood [to speak] about the sleep of sin, as in Eph 5:14: "arise, sleepers, and arise from the dead, and Christ will enlighten you," or also [the sleep] of negligence, as in Prov. 6:9, "How long will you sleep, O sluggard?" Therefore the time for rising from the sleep of sin is through penitence: Ps 126:2, "Rise after you have sat down," but from the sleep of negligence, through solicitude to good works: Is 21:5, "Rise princes, and take up the shield"; Ecclus 32:15, "at the hour of rising be not sad." Afterwards, when he says, "for now is the day of your salvation," he assigns his reason that he said it, saying, "for now our salvation is nearer than when we believed." Here indeed according to the intention of the apostle to be understood to speak of the salvation of eternal life, of which it is said in Is 51:8: "for my salvation will be unto eternity."

Here Thomas delineates six types of sleep:
(1) The sleep of nature, or death
(2) The sleep of vital powers
(3) The sleep of eternal glory
(4) The sleep of contemplation in this life
(5) The sleep of sin
(6) The sleep of negligence.

For each type of sleep, he provides a corresponding Scriptural reference, showing that there is Biblical precedent for the extended use of the term. It seems that sleep in itself signifies a lack or a rest from something. Some thoughts:

1. The sleep of nature is cessation of the natural operation of living as a thing composed of form and matter. Scientists now debate the precise time of death. Part of the difficulty is that many do not acknowledge a spiritual soul, so they do not identify death with the separation of the soul and body. But this definition only points to the difficulty of determining when that separation takes place. If one holds to a plurality of forms, the question would then be multifold: what indicates that the rational soul has separated from the body? Is that separation the definition of "human" death if a lower form remains?

2. The sleep of vital powers is rest from the waking operations of the animal soul, such as sensing. This is ordinarily what we would call "sleep."

3. The sleep of eternal glory is rest from the operation of living in this life, which is not properly an operation but a combination of them; or we could say it is a rest from life in the fallen world. This is more properly said to be a waking state, because in eternal glory the person and his faculties is most fully actualized.

4. The sleep of contemplation in this life is rest from all activities that are contrary to contemplation. Some of the mystics who experienced extraordinary graces in prayer including St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, speak about how there are some moments of contemplation in which the faculties are suspended. In this life, the body, affected by original sin, is a hindrance to the quies contemplationis. Indirectly, of course, the body helps a person begin a life of contemplation because one learns through the senses. In the next life, however, the resurrected body enjoys, in its own mode, the contemplation of the soul which is the beatific vision.

5. The sleep of sin is the cessation of living in a state of grace. From this sleep some can wake by their own power, or ordinary grace: the remedy of venial sin found in prayers, sacrifices, and so on. But others cannot wake from this sleep without an extraordinary grace: to go from the state of mortal sin to that of grace is greater than the creation of the universe out of nothing.

6. The sleep of negligence is rest from doing the good one ought to do. We can identify this with sloth.

Sleep: deaths ally, oblivion of tears
     Silence of passions, balm of angry sore
Suspense of loves, security of fears,
     Wrath's lenitive, heart's ease, storm's calmest shore
Sense's and soul's reprieval from all cumbers,
     Benumbing sense of ill with quiet slumbers.

---St. Robert Southwell, St. Peter's Complaynt

Truthmakers?

2011-11-13T21:22:00.003-05:00

I've been following the debate between Maverick Philosopher and our friend Ocham on whether there are "truthmakers" with great interest. The most recent entries are here and here, respectively. The most interesting thing for me is largely the fact that Ocham, who by all indications is a filthy nominalist and so ought to be anathema to us Scotists, seems to make more sense than Vallicella, with whom as a realist-leaning semi-Platonist I ought to agree more. Not because Vallicella comes across as wrong, exactly, so much as that his approach seems to highlight everything I dislike about contemporary anglophone analytic philosophy. I just can't figure out for the life of me what is the use of all the talk about facts and truthmakers. (By "use" I mean "helpfulness in making sense of the world".) It seems riddled with ambiguity and equivocation and a preoccupation with the way we talk about things at the expense of an inattention to the way things are. I've been wondering whether and how to put in my two cents for a while now, but luckily Vallicella's latest post provides a very helpful summary of the status quaestionis, and I will use it as a platform for my own comments.

Let us confine ourselves to true affirmative contingent nonrelational predications. If you deny that there is any extralinguistic fact or state of affairs that makes it true that Tom is smoking [another oft-used example is Vallicella's is "Al is fat"], then what is your positive theory? Here are some possible views, 'possible' in the sense that they are possibly such as to be held by someone whether fool or sage or someone in between.

So Vallicella will lay out what he sees as the possible alternatives.

1. A contingently true sentence like 'Tom is smoking' is just true; there is nothing external to the sentence, nothing at all, that plays any role in making it true. There is no more to a true sentence than the sentence. Thus no part of the sentence has a worldly correlate, not even the subject term. On this view there is no extralinguistic reality -- or at least no extralinguistic reality that bears upon the truth or falsity of our sentences -- and thus no ontological ground of any kind for the truth of true contingent representations, whether declarative sentences, propositions, judgments, beliefs, whatever the truth-bearers are taken to be.

This alternative is plainly unacceptable. On my view a linguistic expression, such as an sentence, is a (complex) sign. A sign is defined as something that brings to mind something else. A sentence can either be true or false if it asserts something, truth being understood as a sign-relation such that the sign accurately signifies the signified, and falsity as a sign-relation such that the sign does not accurately signify the signified. On this account, then, a sign "all by itself" is neither true nor false. A sign signifies something; if it signifies truly it signifies its significate as it is.

2. A rather less crazy view is that our sample sentence does have something corresponding to it in reality, and that that item is Tom, but nothing else. On this view 'Tom is smoking' has a truth-maker, but the truth-maker is just Tom. On this view the truth-maker role is a legitimate one, and something plays it, but there are no facts, and so no fact is a truth-maker. Note carefully that the question whether there are facts is not the same as the question whether there are truth-makers. It could be that the truth-making riole is played by non-facts, and it itr could be that there are facts but they have no role to play in truth-making.

This must be wrong. "Tom", supposing that "Tom" signifies such-and-such an existing man, does not signify "Tom is smoking", but just "Tom", i.e. "this man". It seems to me that before we can figure out the relationship between the complex sign "Tom is smoking" and the truth it signifies (assuming Tom is in fact smoking) we should understand the relationship between the simple sign "Tom" (the name, vocal expression, written characters, thought) and the existing man Tom. But no one in the debate has tried to do that, as far as I've seen.

Note that in my view Tom cannot be the "truthmaker" for "Tom is smoking" or for any other assertion, because Tom is not signified by "Tom is smoking" in my thought or speech or other true expression, but by the name "Tom", and the name is neither true nor false, being non-assertoric. "Hamlet" (the name of a non-existing fictional character) signifies just as well as "Tom", and is also neither true nor false.

3. On a variant of (2) it is admitted that besides Tom there is also an entity corresponding to the predicate, and the truth-maker of 'Tom is smoking' is the set or the mereological sum, or the ordered pair consting of Tom and the entity corresponding to the predicate.

This is where Vallicella starts to lose me. But the reasons are hard to explain given the way he sets out the alternatives, which is partially why he loses me. Let me present the fourth alternative as well before saying what my problem is.

4. A more radical view is that the truth-maker role is not a legitimate role, hence does not need filling by the members of any category of entity. On this view there are no truth-makers becsuae the very notion of a truth-maker is incoherent. One who takes this line could even admit that there are facts, but he would deny that they play a truth-making role.

The presumption seems to be that "truthmaker" will be a sort of being, a categorial entity, and determining what a truthmaker is means determining what category it falls under. But this presumption is indeed incoherent. A truthmaker could only be a category of entity if every entity about which there were truths fell under the same category; but they don't. I would make the exact same objection to the notion of "facts" as a kind of entity. I admit that there "are" facts and truths, in the sense that many thoughts and sentences are true, and that they are true insofar as they correspond to the facts; but I deny that facts and truthmakers are a kind of category of being.

Let's look at the examples. What makes "Tom is smoking" true? The "fact" that Tom is smoking. But what is this fact? Is it a being? I'm not at all sure that this question is going to get us anywhere. Instead I would ask, what is Tom? and, what is smoking? Now Tom is a man, which means he is a kind of substance. And smoking is an action. So to say that Tom is smoking is to say that a certain substance is performing a certain action. Which is to say that a certain accident belongs to a certain substance. So what are the entities involved in the truth that Tom is smoking? Only, Tom's substance and one of his accidents. The "fact" that Tom is smoking is not something other than these. But note that the "truthmaker" is not the substance Tom nor the accident the action of smoking, but the inherence of the accident in the substance, the "ens per accidens" that is Tom as smoking.

So I'm saying that a "truthmaker" is an accident? No, because here what makes "Tom is smoking" or "Al is fat" true is not the accident "smoking" or "fat" but the inherence of the accidents in their subjects. So I'm saying that a "truthmaker" is a mereological sum? No! First, I deny that a substance and its accidents can be understood as parts of a whole. What makes "Tom is smoking" true is not {Tom}+{smoking}, but the fact that Tom is smoking, the statement of fact being not an assertion of summation but an assertion of inherence. Since Tom is a substance and smoking is an accident, they belong to different categories, and I deny that entities of different categories can be added together as parts of a whole, except on an equivocal understanding of "whole".

So a "truthmaker" is a fact constituted by the inherence of an accident in its subject, like fatness in Al or smoking in Tom? No! Because a truthmaker is defined as the entity that makes its truthbearer true. Now simply stated like this there must be truthmakers, if their denial means that true statements are just true for no reason. That would be crazy, as Vallicella rightly notes. But we're asking what kind of entity a truthmaker is, and it seems clear to me that it can be no kind of being. Because if what makes "Tom is smoking" true is the inherence of an accident in its subject, then it seems that truthmakers are accidental inherences or facts about accidental inherences. But this can't be right, because there are many kinds of truths other than truths about accidental inherences, for instance, the truth that Tom is a man. What is the "truthmaker" for "Tom is a man"? It can't be the inherence of any accident in Tom, because humanity is essential, not accidental, to Tom. "Humanity" is not something that inheres accidentally in Tom but is part of what it is to be Tom. And the statement of fact that Tom is a man is not an assertion of inherence but an assertion that Tom has a certain nature. But essences and accidents are not the same kinds of being, i.e. an action and an essence belong to different categories. So if when I call Tom a man and when I say that Tom is smoking I say that these are two facts about Tom, I cannot be saying that there is one kind of entity, facthood, to which "Tom's-being-a-man" and "Tom's-smoking" belong. Rather there are (here) two kinds of entity, essences and accidents, and Tom has a certain essence and Tom has a certain accident.

In other contexts, however, we might want to state truths about entities that are non-categorial entirely, e.g. God. God exists in no genus, and when I say "God exists" or "God is wise" I'm not predicating a species of a genus or an accident of a subject. Nevertheless I want to say that my assertions are (at least possibly) true. The truthmaker then for such an assertion can't be a substance or an accident or an inherence or anything of the sort.

So let's say that facts are the ways things are, and that truthmakers are what make propositions etc true. If so, then facts and truthmakers cannot belong to a certain category. Because among the things that are, are things belonging to many different categories; and not everything that is belongs to any category. So, to ask "what kind of an entity is a truthmaker?" is in a certain sense a category mistake. A truth maker is not a kind of entity, but an entity of whatever kind. Is this what Vallicella's fifth alternative suggests?:

5. On a still more radical view, there is an extralinguistic reality, but we cannot say what categories of entity it contains.

This is not what I'm saying, since I'm saying that there is an extralinguistic reality, and it contains many categories of things, and there is also some being which is in no category.

On this view one abandons the notion that language mirrors reality, that there is any correspondence or matching between parts of speech and categories of entity. Thus one would abandon the notion that truth is correspondence, that the 'Al is fat' is true just in case the referent of 'Al' exemplifies the property denoted by 'fat.' One would be abandoning the notion that language is any guide at all to ontology.

I do deny that language mirrors reality, in the sense that reality has to have (as Vallicella calls it in several places) a "proposition-like structure" in order for propositions about reality to be true. "God is wise", "Tom is a man", "Tom is smoking", "Al is fat", all have the same linguistic structure, but the "facts" to which they refer, that is, the beings about which they are true, have very different entitative structures.

It occurs to me to ask why we should think that, just because our speech can express what is, language ought to be "any guide at all to ontology". I suppose this is me doubting the usefulness of the whole "linguistic turn". Why should an examination of how we say things tell us anything special about the way things are? Shouldn't we examine the way things are and then ask if the way we talk about them is true or false? However, I certainly agree that Al's being fat is the reason it is true to say "Al if fat", and that Al's and Tom's being human is the reason it is true to say "Al and Tom are men".

So perhaps it seems that I'm suggesting that there's an alternative Vallicella left out. Between the notion that a truthmaker must be some category of entity and the notion that no category of entity can be a truthmaker, perhaps we should say that any categorial or supracategorial being can serve as a truthmaker? In this case, however, why should I ever talk about "truthmakers" or "facts"? Why shouldn't I just talk about being? It's totally clear and obvious that there are beings, and it also seems obvious to me that metaphysics ought to study what being is like: what are the categories, what falls under them, what belongs to no category, etc. But if "truthmakers" and "facts" are just beings, or rather, ways of talking about being in relation to our assertions, and in such a way as to render it enormously confusing whether they are supposed to be some special sort of being or not, what is the "value added" of dragging these terms into metaphysics?

Ocham seems to agree that if it is true to say "Tom is smoking" or "Al is fat", this is because in reality Tom is smoking, or Al is fat. That is to say, our speech is true because of the way being is. But the beings in question are Tom and his activities and Al and his qualities and quantities. Do we need to drag in beings other than this? Or are the "truthmakers" of our sentences and the "facts" supporting them just these beings, but considered under a certain aspect, as related to our speech? If this is Ocham's confusion, then I share it, along with his dubious attitude towards the need to talk about truthmakers and facts as distinct from the beings our assertions are about at all.

What is a Formality II

2011-11-10T23:58:00.000-05:00

For Part 1, see here.

Today we are going to look at what Antonius Andreas has to say about the matter. Antonius was from Aragon-Catalonia, might have studied a Paris (though there is no evidence of this), and taught at Monzon and Lerida in Catalonia. He wrote numerous commentaries on Aristotle from a scotistic point of view and was dead by the 1330's.

Oddly, the same text of the definition in Assisi 668 has "subiectalis" rather than "obiectalis".

Antonius Andreas, QQ. in Met. IV q. 2 a. 1 (ed. ?, unfoliated)

Utrum negatio habeat distinctam formalitatem ab affirmatione cui opponitur.

Quantum ad primum, primo premittam rationem ‘formalitatis’ quam describo sic: formalitas est ratio obiectalis in re apprehensa ab intellectu ex natura rei quam non oportet semper movere intellectum dummodo actum intellectus possit terminare.

Quod dico pro tanto quia licet aliquid posset terminare actum intellectus, non tamen semper potest intellectum ad sui intellectionem movere, sicut communiter dicitur quod relationes non movent intellectum ratione dependentie et quia non sunt aliquod absolutum, et tamen terminant actum intellectus. Similiter proprietates individuales ex eo quod non habent rationem quid, ideo non movent intellectum et tamen terminant actum eius. Similiter(?) negationes terminant licet non moveant intellectum quatenus non sunt entia, ita(?) per(?) tria(?) requiruntur ad hoc quod aliquod moveat intellectum: primum quod sit ens, secundum quod sit absolutum, tertium quod habeat rationem quid vel essentie. Propter primum removentur negationes, propter secundum relationes, propter tertium omnis proprietas ypostatica vel proprietas personalis in divinis et | proprietates individuales, que omnia licet actum intellectus terminent, non tamen movent intellectum.

Ex ista descriptione concludo correlarie quod quecumque possunt distincte concipi per intellectum habent distinctas formalitates ex natura rei.

Translation:

Whether a negation has a formality distinct from that to which it is opposed

As far as the first article is concerned, first I premise the definition of "formality", which I describe thus: A formality is an objective ratio in a thing apprehended by the intellect from the nature of the thing, which it is not necessary to always move the intellect, provided that it can terminate the act of the intellect.

I say this for the reason that although something could terminate the act of the intellect, nevertheless it is not always able to move the intellect to the intellection of it, just as commonly is said that relations don't move the intellect by a notion of dependence, and because they are not something absolute, and nevertheless they terminate the act of the intellect. Likewise individual properties from this that they do not have the notion of a 'what', therefore they do not move the intellect and nevertheless they terminate its act. Likewise negations terminate [the act of the intellect], although they do not move the intellect, because they are not beings. To clarify this, it should be known that three things are required for something to move the intellect: first that it is a being, second that it is absolute, third that it has the notion of a 'what' or an essence. On account of the first negations are removed, relations on account of the second, on account of the third every hypostatic property or personal property in the divine and individual properties, all of which, although they terminate the act of the intellect, nevertheless do not move the intellect.

From that description I conclude as a corollary that whatever can be conceived distinctly by the intellect has distinct formalities from its nature.

[recall that for Scotus, "ex natura rei" means "prior to the operation of the intellect", so "real"].

Happy Feast of Scotus!

2011-11-08T12:10:00.003-05:00

Er, or is it an optional memorial in the Archdiocese of Cologne and the Francsican order?

Here's a link to the festivities at the Antonianum.

Some Elementary Metaphysics

2011-11-07T18:10:00.004-05:00

Define a substance as the actuality of an essence which in its act of being (essendo) does not depend on another essence subjectively sustaining it in the same supposit. By an essence I mean an intelligible ratio. By "subjectively sustaining" x I mean acting as a subject for x. By a supposit I mean a singular concrete existent.

All right, then: a substance so defined exists. I take it for granted that something exists. Call it x. If x is not essentially dependent on anything in its supposit, x is a substance. If what you admit exists is dependent on something subjectively sustaining it in its supposit - if x is dependent on y - I ask whether y is independent or whether it depends on another. On pain of infinite regress we have to come to something which is not essentially dependent in the sense defined, and this will be the substance sustaining x.

Granted that substances exist, accidents can be shown to exist from the fact of change. In change a substate x remains itself while becoming different in some respect: Socrates sitting becomes Socrates standing, xa-->xb. That x remains the same is presupposed by the notion of change; otherwise we would have mere annihilation of a and subsequent creation of b. But if x is identical across xa and xb, then x does not essentially depend on a or b, while either a or b may belong to x; therefore in both xa and xb a and b are accidental to x.

Cf. Scotus, Quaest. in Metaph. VII. Q.2 n.24.

An Argument for the Distinction of Intellect and Will

2011-11-04T17:36:00.000-04:00

An old one, perhaps. This is one of the principal arguments from an anonymous question traditionally (since Ledoux's edition in the 1930's) attributed to William of Alnwick: utrum simplicitas divina compatiatur secum aliquam distinctionem ex natura rei previam distinctioni persone.

f. 87rb: Quandocumque sunt aliqua idem ex parte rei totaliter, quidquid convenit uni et alii; si ergo intellectus et voluntas sunt idem totaliter et ut precedunt distinctionem personarum, ergo intellectus vellet et voluntas intelligeret et cum intellectus intelligeret malum culpe voluntas vellet.

Translation:

Whenever there are things that are totally the same from the nature of a thing, whatever befalls one will also befall the other; if therefore the intellect and the will are totally the same and as they precede the distinction of [the Trinitarian] persons, therefore the intellect will will and the will will understand and when the intellect understands the evil of fault, the will will will it.

Harmonization of Thomas and Scotus on Univocity

2011-10-17T11:14:00.001-04:00

From Petrus de Attarabia, a Franciscan who taught at the studium at Barcelona around the same time as Petrus Thomae (1320's).

I tend to rag on Thomism a bit on this blog, so I thought I would post an attempt to show how Scotus and Thomas actually agree on the issue of univocity. A modest olive branch, if you will.

This position is the sort of thing generally left out of the grand narratives of the decline of the West in general and scholasticism in particular, being as they are in a rush to jump to Ockham and link Scotus' voluntarism with Ockham's.

Petrus de Attarabia sive de Navarra, Sent. I d. 3 pt. 1 q. 1 a. 3 (ed. Sagues Azcona vol. 2, 189-92):

As far as the third [article], I say that, as it seems to me, the first [opinio Thomae] and second [opinio Scoti] do not in fact disagree (I speak of the principal doctors who posited the aforesaid opinion; but [if] some others have declared otherwise, I don't care).

For harmonizing therefore each opinion, it should be known that an univocal concept is understood in two ways. In one way an univocal concept is taken from the unity and indifference of those things to which it is common and a mode of conceiving. And in that way it is univocation properly said, and of such as many the philosophers speak, and in that way genus and species are called univocal and other universals and also the categories.

In the other way an univocal concept is received only from the indifference of the mode of conceiving. Example: some man is individual, vague, common, univocal to all individual men under individual differences; but to individuals as such nothing is common unless from the mode of conceiving. This univocal is not a real universal, but is common only by a community of reason and mode of conceiving, just as is posited in the divine that 'person' is something common by community of reason to the three divine persons.

To apply this to the matter at hand: by taking univocation in the first way, being is not univocal, because then it would be a genus, nor would the statement of the Philosopher be true, I Physics, where he says that "since being is said in many ways" etc.; nor his statement in IV Metaphysics "that being is said of beings just as health of animal and of medicine." And the arguments adduced for the first opinion efficaciously prove this. And I believe that it is impossible that being is univocal in this way, because God and creature are entirely distinguished; otherwise God would not be irreducibly simple.

Therefore by taking univocation in the second way, namely which is received from the indifference of the mode of conceiving, I say that being is univocal to God and creature, substance and accident, because our intellect conceives being under indifference, not that that indifference is from the part of the thing or things, but the intellect has this from its own nature. And in that way being is not a real universal or genus, but is said common by such unity that it suffices for preserving a contradiction and for avoiding equivocation in the middle term of a syllogism. And in that way common propositions and first [propositions] are one, and likewise the questions "is it?" and "what is it?" etc. II Posterior analytics. And in this way all the arguments of the second opinion conclude. All [doctors] have denied univocity in the first way, but not in the second way, at least some [have not denied it].

The Contingent Will

2011-10-13T22:13:00.002-04:00

I read St Thomas' Commentary on the Metaphysics in my 1935 Marietti edition, but the following, lifted from The Logic Museum, saves typing:

lib. 6 l. 2 n. 13 Contingens autem ad utrumlibet, non potest esse causa alicuius inquantum huiusmodi. Secundum enim quod est ad utrumlibet, habet dispositionem materiae, quae est in potentia ad duo opposita: nihil enim agit secundum quod est in potentia. Unde oportet quod causa, quae est ad utrumlibet, ut voluntas, ad hoc quod agat, inclinetur magis ad unam partem, per hoc quod movetur ab appetibili, et sic sit causa ut in pluribus. Contingens autem ut in paucioribus est ens per accidens cuius causa quaeritur. Unde relinquitur, quod causa entis per accidens sit contingens ut in pluribus, quia eius defectus est ut in paucioribus. Et hoc est ens per accidens.

1183. But that which is contingent, or open to opposites, cannot as such be the cause of anything. For insofar as it is open to opposites it has the character of matter, which is in potency to two opposites; for nothing acts insofar as it is in potency. Hence a cause which is open to opposites in the way that the will is, in order that it may act, must be inclined more to one side than to the other by being moved by the appetible object, and thus be a cause in the majority of cases. But that which takes place in only a few instances is the accidental, and it is this whose cause we seek. Hence it follows that the cause of the accidental is what occurs in the majority of cases, because this fails to occur in only a few instances. And this is what is accidental.

Here is a good succinct statement of the Aristotelian-Thomist (A-T) doctrine of the will: the will is primarily and for the most part a passive, moved, faculty, an appetite inclined to an appetible object and determined and moved by the appetible object acting as final cause and by the intellect presenting objects to it.

The contrary doctrine is the Augustinian-Scotist one. Just the other day I was rereading portions of Augustine's De libero arbitrio and was impressed by how exactly his view matches up with Scotus': the will is not determined either by its appetites or by what the intellect presents. The will is active and self-determining. There is no cause for why the will wills {a} rather than {b} other than the determination of the will itself. The will has real contingency in itself. Its manner of causality is separate from that of nature, which acts always or for the most part in a determinate way and fails only per accidens. The will's power over opposites is not of itself inclined towards either of the two opposites and is free to choose between them even if the appetites are inclined one way or the other and even if the will often or typically follows them.

The lecture from Aquinas' commentary on Metaphysics book VI does not return to the will and does not provide anything helpful in the way of showing where the contingency of the will comes from or how it can occasionally and per accidens avoid being determined by the appetites. That's not a criticism, since Aristotle's text is about per accidens being in general and Aquinas only brings up the will as a brief example. Still, I think there's a hint of a problem here which is never really resolved. In my opinion the A-T theory ends up giving an unsatisfactory account of freedom compared to the A-S one, and this has implications for everything from human nature up to the contingency of creation and the internal divine operations.

Christian Philosophy

2011-10-07T00:25:00.006-04:00

Some of us over the years have wondered about Dr William Vallicella's religious views. Now he tells us clearly: he is not a Christian. He indicates his own position as being closest to the following formulation. Christian dogmas:

are false and/or incoherent in many of their formulations, but hide nuggets of truth that can excavated and refined and reformulated in ways that are rationally acceptable. An example of this is Kant's project in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.

Dr Vallicella posits five possible attitudes towards Christian dogmas. What he does not do is distinguish the attitude of the Christian philosopher against any possible attitude of the non-Christian philosopher. The attitude of the Christian philosopher is, in its classic formulation from St Anselm, who got it from St Augustine, credo ut intellegam, I believe so that I may understand.

Now I agree, with Fr John Wippel against Etienne Gilson and the earlier Maritain, that there is no such thing as a "Christian philosophy". There is just philosophy, practiced by Christians and by non-Christians. Sometimes the practice of philosophy can be a praeambulum to Christianity, as in the case of St Justin Martyr and many other famous and less-famous cases. But philosophizing per se is not a religious activity and has no essentially religious content. Philosophy is the unrestricted and holistic application of reason to life.

That being said, philosophizing doesn't happen in a vacuum. Man is a rational, but also a religious animal. Socrates questioned the stories of the poets about the gods, but, contrary to his accusers, did not challenge or reject the gods of the city, much less the existence of the God of philosophy, the One - whoever he was - that gave him his vocation. And Aristotle always took as his starting-point on any particular issue the doxa, the opinions of the common man and of his own philosophical predecessors, rejecting what was faulty or inadequate in favor of a better formulation, but never assuming that the doxa were to be utterly rejected and replaced by complete novelties. This would be hubristically and arrogantly to assume that oneself is already wise and that all other men have always been fools.

The Christian philosopher, then, doesn't have some special kind of philosophy that atheists or pagans don't have; but at the same time he doesn't begin philosophizing neutrally, as though everything he believes might just as well turn out to be false. If modern philosophy has given us one apodictic certitude it's that radical Cartesian doubt is foolish, that it begins with nothing and ends with nothing, or worse. This is not to say that the philosopher holds rigidly to his beliefs no matter what the result of his reasoning, either: otherwise the notion of rational conversion would be absurd. But philosophes have not only gone from Christianity to apostasy and libertinism under the influence of reason; they have also gone from any number of positions to a rational Christianity. I myself am a convert to the Catholic Church.

One does not reason to Christianity or reason to Catholicism in the sense that philosophy ever proves (in any sense) that the Christian doctrines are true. On the other hand, neither does one prove against Descartes or Kant that we experience the world, or that we are awake. We can't prove everything, because doing so would produce an infinite regress. We can however show that to believe that I am now, as I write, am asleep is absurd, that to deny that I experience the world is unreasonable. We can also argue that the doctrines of Christianity are not unreasonable. This does not show that they are true, but it shows that I might reasonably believe that they are true. And if I believe that they are true, I can think about them rationally and philosophically as truths.

The orientation towards religious doctrines as truths - not as puzzles, not as myths, not as more or less acceptable attempts at formulating truths - is the attitude of the credo ut intellegam. It is fundamentally different from the attitude an unbeliever like Dr Vallicella will take towards them. The Anselmian formulation is paralleled by the Augustinian one, "unless you believe you will not understand" - not because the doctrines of the faith are unreasonable or unintelligible, but because without the light of faith the thinker will remain like Aristotle's blind man reasoning about colors: the syllogisms may be logically valid but the thinker will have no way to know to what extent they relate to reality. It's as though a Cartesian were to entertain, but merely as an amusing hypothesis, his existence outside of his brain-vat; except that (in my opinion) real existential Cartesian doubt is absurd and impossible, but real religious doubt is not. The existence of a subjective world of beings beyond my experience of an objective world constituted and co-caused by my mental activity is self-evident, its contrary formulated only with enormous difficulty and under the influence of powerful sophistries; I don't perceive the truth of religious doctrine in the same way or with the same rational force.

There is an ineradicable element of will in belief, analogous to accepting that someone loves me. I can know that my wife exists and that she has a mind like mine; but that she loves me, and that her love is the key fact whereby I ought to interpret her words and actions towards me rather than some more cynical alternative, is not unreasonable, but is also unprovable: I must choose to accept or not accept it, and act accordingly. The unbelieving philosopher, like the suspicious spouse, has access to all the same data as the believer, but sees that the data can rationally be taken another way, and wills so to take it or to abstain from committing to a judgment one way or the other.

The Christian philosopher then is not simply a thinker who chooses to think about the dogmas of Christianity, rather than some other puzzles, or one who finds the traditional dogmatic solutions to the puzzles the most rationally satisfying (this is the entirely modern phenomenon of "philosophy of religion" which, insofar as it is separate on the one hand from metaphysics and on the other from theology, I abominate and abhor). Like the philosopher of the ancient schools, or the modern existentialist, his discipline is not (merely) a logical game or a quasi-scientific method or technique, but an approach (among possible approaches) to being. He is a philosopher who believes in God, Christ, the sacraments, Mary and the Saints, sin, heaven and hell, as he believes in friendship and in love, as unprovable but obviously there; who approaches his God rationally as he approaches his own soul and the world, as concrete beings in need of rational explication; who looks to philosophy to help him both think and live, but who looks to religion, as to direct experience, to provide the things to think about and live among and towards.

Swift on Scotus

2011-10-06T15:25:00.001-04:00

From Gulliver's Travels, pt. 3. The scene is an island of a necromancer who calls up the dead. Gulliver calls up all the greats of history in order to ask them about what really happened.

I introduced Didymus and Eustathius to Homer, and prevailed on him to treatm them better than perhaps they deserved; for he soon found they wanted a Genius to enter into the spirit of a Poet. But Aristotle was out of all Patience with the Account I gave him of Scotus and Ramus, as I presented them to him; and he asked them whether the rest of the Tribe were as great Dunces as themselves.

Argument for the Formal Distinction

2011-10-02T21:29:00.004-04:00

I was leafing through my copy of Summula Philosophiae Scholasticae by J.S. Hickey (Dublin, 1912), and in volume 1, page 315, I came across the following passage in a long footnote given in English. It's attributed to a Jesuit named Rickaby, but there's no complete bibliographical citation. As far as I can tell - it's a little unclear - it's from a book called First Principles of Knowledge:

The Scotists within what, as a thing, is undifferenced, profess to find actually different "realities," which they also call "formalitates." . . . The individual man, Peter, is one undifferenced object, yet the individuality, considered formally as the individuality is not the humanity considered formally as the humanity. Hence the Scotists argue that there must be some real difference between them a parte rei, in the object itself: it need not be a difference between thing and thing, but at least it is a difference between a real formality and another real formality in one thing. Their opponents deny that the conclusion follows from the premises: they affirm that our method of abstracting one aspect from another is such, that two different aspects can be taken of an object which in itself presents no real distinction of its own, to correspond with that which we mentally make. Of itself it offers to the mind a ground for drawing the distinction, but it does not do more. There is then a virtual distinction, but there is not an actual one. This explanation seems intelligibly to meet all the requirements of the case: whereas the Scotist distinction between res and realitas is an enigma, which its proposers have no right to force upon our acceptance. Either they mean no more than our explanation admits, or if they do mean more the addition is not acceptable. For it would drive us to suppose, that whenever the weakness of our intelligence obliges us to conceive an object by a succession of ideas, one of which does not include the notes contained in another, there we come across some actual distinction in the object conceived. A doctrine which fits in better with a sound system of philosophy is, that what in itself is undistinguished is to us distinguishable by mental abstraction.

This is a pretty fair account of the formal distinction and sounds like a pretty fair critique. The problem that I have with it is twofold:

1) First, the notion of the "undistinguished in itself" which nevertheless provides a "ground" for the distinction of reason, which in the thing remains "virtual", is specious. Either Socrates' humanity and Socrateity are in every respect absolutely identical, or they are not. If so, what is the "ground" in the thing for distinguishing between them in abstraction? If not, and if all agree that Socrates' humanity and his individuating factor cannot be separated and are not really distinct, then we need some intermediate distinction.

2) I deny that the Scotist distinction between res and realitas is an enigma. On the contrary, it is quite clear. Socrates is one and self-identical. Socrateity and humanity in Socrates are not altogether and in every respect the same. Socrateity is of itself individual; humanity is common. Socrateity exists only in Socrates; humanity exists both in Socrates and in Plato. While it is the case that humanity is inseparable from Socrateity, in the sense that this particular instance of humanity cannot exist apart from Socrates, because Socrates without this humanity is not Socrates, just as Socrates without Socrateity is not Socrates, nevertheless humanity as a common nature, as existing both in Socrates and in Plato - and it does not belong to humanity as common and as a specific formal ratio to belong to Socrates, but only insofar as it is also a this, which is outside its formal ratio and provided precisely by the additional determination of its individuating factor - it can and does exist outside of Socrates. Therefore this really existing humanity in Socrates and the individuating formal factor in Socrates cannot be separated in reality, and yet they are not wholly identical, but are distinct to the extent just explained, and so are distinct in this sense prior to any consideration by the intellect. So they are formally distinct.

Similarly, the poem the Iliad is a single intelligible matter (this collection of words) with a single intelligible form (this arrangement of those words). Within this poem many formal realities can be distinguished, examined individually, and considered apart from one another. For instance, the character of Achilles is not the same thing as the plot of the poem as a whole; neither is the same as the style of the poem; nor are any of these identical with the hexametric rhythm. All of these - the character of Achilles, the plot, the style, the rhythm - pervade the poem and are in some sense present in all its parts (Achilles' character is present throughout, for instance, as the (proximate or remote) efficient and final causes of most of the action, even when he's not onstage). None of these elements are really distinct from these words in this order, nor consequently from each other. However, they are clearly not all absolutely identical with each other either. None of them could be removed from the Iliad without destroying the poem; but any of them can exist somewhere else without the others. As this, as actually existing in this poem, they necessarily coeexist; as considered as formal ratios in themselves, they need not necessarily coeexist. For instance, the style is almost inevitably lost, along with the hexametric rhythm, in a translation which retains the plot and the character. Or a new poem could be written containing the character of Achilles, but not the plot; or the same plot could be recycled with different characters, and so on. This clearly shows that the distinction between these different elements is not purely a product a product of my mind, but rather my mind's distinguishing follows from what in the poem is already distinct.

We don't posit the formal distinction, then, because the "weakness of our intellect obliges" us to conceive of things as different which are really inseparable; but because our intellect grasps the different realities which, although in the thing as individually existing are really and inseparably identical, are not wholly identical and may in some circumstances, in another individually existing thing, exist apart.

In the main text Hickey, after giving another summary account of the formal distinction, says, along with a quote from someone else named Liberatore (I'm clearly not completely up on my manualist writers):

Atvero invenire . . . quamdam tertiam distinctionem, subtilius est quam quod intelligi possit. Porro, "haec opinio . . . est vana et periculosa. Est vana, quia ad distinguenda ea, propter quae adstruitur, sufficit distinctio rationis cum fundamento in re. Est autem periculosa, quia, quum istae formalitates a natura rei proponantur ut totidem distinctae perfectiones, officit simplicitati divinae naturae."

I translate:

And they find a certain third distinction, unthinkably subtle. Yet "this opinion is vain and dangerous. Vain, because a distinction of reason with a foundation in the thing is sufficient to distinguish those on account of which it is added. Dangerous, because, since those formalities are proposed as being on the side of the nature of thing, as so many distinct perfections, it impedes the simplicity of the divine nature."

Of course, from our point of view, and as we have argued here and elsewhere many, many times, the beauty of the formal distinction is precisely that, without positing any composition whatsoever in God, it serves to render meaningless any difficulties that might arise from positing an absolute identity between, say, the intellect and will in God. Because the formalities are not really distinct - they are not, for instance, different parts - they don't detract from perfect and complete simplicity. But because they do not formally include one another and so are not absolutely and in every respect identical, it is possible, for instance, that God understands something which he does not create, or understands necessarily what he creates contingently.

More on the formal distinction, among other places, here.

Narrative, Philosophy, and the History of Philosophy

2011-09-29T20:42:00.004-04:00

The discussion on Faber's previous post has become quite interesting. I began another comment but it grew so gargantuan that I'm putting it here in a new post.

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

Robert Barron on Univocity and Voluntarism

2011-09-27T00:02:00.000-04:00

Fr. Robert Barron recently made the following comment on this blog post, in the comments of which there was some discussion of the link between univocity and voluntarism in Scotus.

I would like to respond to the charge that I “erred” in linking Scotus’s voluntarism to his univocal conception of being. There is indeed a strong connection between the two. Once God is construed as one being, however supreme, among many, then the metaphysical links that tie creatures to God are severed and therefore the relation between us and God is established primarily through will. To see the details of the argument, I’d recommend my book The Priority of Christ, but that’s the very real connection between voluntarism and a univocal conception of being.

Now, I have written on fr. Barron before, but since he is so influential in popular catholicsm I think his views need to be addressed again since it is clear he will continue to misrepresent Scotus' views by relying on postmodernist jargon that avoids dealing with Scotus' arguments. To see the effects of this view in action, simply read "Nick's" review of Fr. Barron's book mentioned in his quotation at google books. Nick gives an extremely bad "narrative" (I put this in quotation marks because it is the sort of word these people like, even though it is inherently relativistic and only shows them to be compromised by the very "secular values" they so decry in Scotus), despite his having studied the book directly with the author.

So lets review Fr. Barron's The Priority of Christ, with special attention to the relation between univocity and voluntarism. First, some quotations.

(p. 12-13):

There have in recent years been numerous accounts of the etiology of modernity. Jurgen Habermas, Hans Urs von Balthasar, John Milbank, Colin Gunton, and Louis Dupre, among many others, have offered explanations of the transition from the premodern to the modern. I subscribe to the proposal that liberal modernity can best be seen as an energetic reaction to a particular and problemaitc version of nominalist Christianity. Early modernity saw itself as a salutary response to oppressive and obscurantist strains in Christian culture, but since it was reacting to a corruption of true Christianity, it itself became similarly distorted and exaggerated. As a result the two systems settled into a centuries-long and terribly unproductive warfare. Even when the two attempted a reconciliation (as in all forms of liberal Christianity in the past two centuries), the results were less than satisfactory, precisely because each party was itself a sort of caricature.

The trouble began with Duns Scotus's option for a univocal conception of being in contradistinction to Thomas Aquinas's analogical understanding. For Thomas, God, as the sheer act of to-be itself (ipsum esse subsistens), is that through which all creatures exist. What follows epistemologically from this metaphysical claim is that the meaning of "to-be," in reference to God and creatures, must be analogical, with God as primary analogue and created things as secondary. In accord with this intuitition, Aquinas maintained consistently throughout his career that God is inescapably mysterious to the human intellect, since our frame of reference remains the creaturely mode of existence, which bears only an analogical resemblance to the divine mode of being. We may say that God exists, but we're not quite sure what we mean when we say it; the "cash value" of the claim that God exists is that there is a finally mysterious source of the to-be of finite things.

In an effort to make the to-be of God more immediately intelligibile, Duns Scotus proposed a univocal conception of existence, according to which God and creatures belong to the same basic metaphysical category, the genus of being. Though God is infinite and therefore quantitatively superior to any creature or collectivity of creatures, there is nevertheless no qualitative difference, in the metaphysical sense, bewteen the supreme being, God, and finite beings. Whereas Aquinas insisted that God is categorizable in no genus whatsover, Scotus held that God and creatures do belong together to a logical category, that in a real sense, transcends and includes them. The implications of this shift are enormous and, to my mind, almost entirely negative. If the analogical conception of being is rejected, creatures are no longer seen as participating in the divine to-be; instead, God and creatures are appreciated as existing side by side, as beings of varying types and degrees of intensity. Furthermore, unanchored from their shared participation in God, no longer grounded in a common source, creatures lose their essential connectedness to one another. Isolated and self-contained individuals (God the supreme being and them any creatures) are now what is most basically real

Scotus's intuition was confirmed a generation later by his Franciscan successor William of Occam. Congruent with his nominalism, which denied ontological density to the unifying features of being, Occam held that there is nothing real outside of disconnected individual things (praeter illas partes absolutas nulla res est). As for Scotus so for Occam, God and creatures are set side by side, joined only through a convention of logic that assigns them to the category of "beings". A consequence of this conception is that God and finite things have to be rivals, since their individualities are contrastive and mutually exclusive. Just as a chair is itself precisely in the measure that it is no other creaturely thing, so God is himself only inasmuch as he stands over and against the world he has made, and vice versa. Whereas in Aquinas's participation metaphysics the created universe is constituted by its rapport with God, on Occam's reading it must realize itself through disassociation from a competitive supreme being. A further concomitant of this indivdualistic ontology is voluntarism. Since the metaphysically dense and natural link between God and creatures has been attenuated, any connection betwen the divine and the nondivine has to be through will. God's relation with his rational creatures is therefore legalistic and arbitrary. This understanding of divine power influenced Occam's conception of the human will as well. Finite freedom is, for him, absolute spontaneity, an action prorpted by nothing either interior or exterior to the subject. Accordingly, human power is a distant mirror of divine power: both are self-contained, capricious, absolute, and finally irrational. The most obvious practical consquence of this nominalist and voluntarist metaphysics is that divine and human freedom find themselves pitted against one another, God imposing himself arbitrarily on a necessarily reluctant and resentful humanity.

Both Martin Luther and John Calvin were formed according to the principales of late-medieval nominalism ...

[p. 193 repeats basically the same regarding univocity. Note that here the category that God and creatures allegedly share is a metaphysical one]

[p. 194]

"God" becomes but the collectivity of creatures considered as a totality. In this sense, modern pantheism is the logical fulfillment of Scotus' adoption of a univocal conception of being: God and the world can be spoken of univocally because there is finally no difference between them

.

[p. 202, following a quote from William James]

How like Scotus's claim that God and creatures are both beings, though the former is infinite and the latter finite, one the biggest part, the other smaller parts. God, in sum, is a being among others, capable of influencing lower relaitites without comporomising them, exisiting in the same universe as they and subject to the same metaphysical constraints.

Summary of Barron's position:
1. There are bad things that happened in the past that influence the present.
2. There is a popular narrative held by popular theologians that lays the blame for the clash of Christianity and modernity at Scotus' door.

Barron's statement of Scotus' position:

1. Scotus proposed a univocal conception of existence.
2. He did this to make God more intelligible.
3. On Scotus' view, God and creatures share the same metaphysical category, the genus of being.
4. God is infinite and quantitatively superior to creatures, but there is no qualitative difference between God and creatures "in the metaphysical sense".
5. Scotus held that God and creatures are contained in a logical category that transcends them.

Barrons's view of the consequences of Scotus' position:

1. If the analogical world-view is rejected, creatures no longer are seen as participating in the divine "to-be".
2. God and creatures are "appreciated" side by side, as beings among beings, differing only by degrees and intensity.
3. Once participation is gone, creatures are no longer connected to each other.
4. The "most basically real" becomes isolated and self-contained individuals.
5. As a result of their being individuals, God and creatures somehow become rivals.
6. Voluntarism: "Since the metaphysically dense and natural link between God and creatures has been attenuated, any connection betwen the divine and the nondivine has to be through will". I'm not sure, but this "link" must be participation.
7. A laundry list of the usual alleged bad effects of voluntarism: capriciousness, problems with freedom, law, etc.

Contra Robert Barron:

Some general observations:

*Fr. Barron cites only pomo theologians, no primary sources; so in the end it is an argument from authority.
*Scotus, Aquinas, and Ockham aren't interested in "intuitions" but arguments.
*I'm not sure, but fr. Barron might be assuming that all the scholastics had a common, shared view on existence. But this is not the case, for Aquinas' views were quite idiosyncratic and controversial at the time. Remember Scotus' comment from Ord. IV: "I know not that fiction that states that essence and existence are really distinct" or somesuch.
*For much of what I will say I rely on my previous posts in the fundamenta series wherein I quote and explain Scotus' views on univocity.

Against Barron's statement of Scotus' position:

(1). False. Scotus proposed a univocal concept of being, a concept which does not correspond to any external, extramental reality. As Richard Cross likes to say, it is a "vicious abstraction". See the fundamenta posts for the arguments that Scotus uses to establish this. He didn't just propose it, he thought he had arguments to support it.

(2). False. Scotus did it to ensure that the arguments that theologians make about God don't commit the fallacy of equivocation. Scotus is quite up front about this in Ord. I d. 3.

(3.) False. Scotus says directly the opposite in Ord. I d. 8 q. 3 (ed. Vat. IV, ca. p. 200). A metaphysical category would be a real extramental category (Barron can't make up his mind whether God and creatures share a metaphysical or logical category). But everyone since Aristotle agreed that being can't be a genus. Scotus also agreed with this. Scotus thinks that if being were a genus that contained God and creatures divine simplicity would be compromised because God there would be a reality for the genus (being) and another reality for the specific difference (divine).

(4.) This one I don't understand. I suppose infinity was often thought of in quantitative terms, but in Scotus it is an intrinsic mode of the divine essence and he conceives of it (ie. infinity qua intrinsic mode) on the model of quality, which admits of degrees. But to say that in the metaphysical sense there is no qualitative difference between God and creatures is simply false.

(5). False. Scotus denies that God and creatures are both contained in a category. See above (1) and (3).

So there you have it. All of Fr. Barron's statements about Scotus' actual position are false. Consequences are a nasty business, as they basically amount to character assassination by blaming Scotus for Ockham. But we could just as easily blame Aquinas for Scotus, and therefore also for Ockham. I will comment on some of the consequences.

Against Barron's "Consequences"

(1). Scotus never rejected analogy. As one can read in the fundamenta post on univocity, Scotus argues for a concept that is "not only analogical but univocal". So he accepts analogical concepts as well as univocal concepts. Also, Scotus never rejects participation. And in any case, analogy is a doctrine about terms, while participation is a metaphysical doctrine. So while they may be connected, I don't think they are necessarily so.

(2). I don't know what "appreciated" means here. But yes, Scotus thinks God and creatures differ by degrees: infinite ones.

(3.) Scotus doesn't deny participation. Also, participation is in God, not in other creatures. Creatures are connected only insofar as they share the same form. I suppose one could say humans participate in the species-form of humanity.

(4). Um, but that's true. I don't know about the "isolated" part, but everything enjoying actual, extramental existence presumably is an individual (I'm not a platonist, I confess).

(5) Nonsense.

(6) This is what Fr. Barron's blog post that I quoted above was about. But since Barron already thinks that univocity makes God just a being among beings, it seems more plausible that we would have much greater access to and knowledge of God, and so we wouldn't have to rely purely on his will to know what to do. But if this won't do, note that the claim seems to be about the loss of participation. But I already pointed out, Scotus doesn't deny participation, nor does he deny analogy.
Conclusion:

Lee Faber's prescription for dealing with modern chaos in theology: develop a post-theological Christian theology. We can do this by
(1) getting rid of inherently relativized terms such as "culture","value", "narrative", "genealogy", and so on, and talk about arguments.
(2) Reading primary sources.

Recent Publications on Petrus Thomae

2011-09-24T12:25:00.001-04:00

an article:

G.R. Smith, "Bibliotheca Manuscripta Petri Thomae," in Bulletin de philosophie medievale 52 (2010), 161-200.

an edition:

Pere Tomas, Tractatus Brevis de Modis Distinctionum, ed. with English and Catalan translations by Cecilia Lopez and Josep Batalla with an introduction by Claus Andersen. Barcelona 2011.

For this edition, see the homepage for the series Bibliotheca Philosophorum Medii Aevi Cataloniae.

The edition is of what Smith, above, calls the "A" redaction of Peter Thomae's treatise. The "B" redaction was edited some time ago by E. Bos.

More on the Duns Scotus Movie

2011-09-21T15:26:00.000-04:00

Here. Apparently Ignatius press will start selling the film in October.

Buridan contra Fundamentalism and Postmodernism

2011-09-12T23:24:00.007-04:00

The meaning of a word has never obliged us [to construe words only in their proper senses, and to concede or deny propositions only according to what is required by their proper senses]. On the contrary, sometimes we must construe words their proper senses, and sometimes in improper senses, as in parabolic or ironic [expressions], or in other ways even more removed from the proper senses. For example, if we read the books of learned authors such as Aristotle or Porphyry, we must construe their words according to the senses those authors have imposed upon them, even if these are improper senses. And so we must concede that, strictly speaking, those words are true because they are true as construed in those senses. But even so, we must say that they have been imposed in such senses, and that if they had been imposed in their proper senses, they would be false. And if people reading the books of learned authors were to construe their words differently than they believe them to have been imposed by their authors, they would be insolent and cantankerous, and unworthy to study or read the books of the philosophers. In the same way, we must say that every word of the Bible and the Gospels is strictly speaking true, and we must construe these words in the senses in which they have been imposed and according to which they are true. And those who do otherwise are mistaken, as well as being blasphemers, or perhaps even heretics. But even so, we can correctly state in connection with many of these words that they are false, if imposed and construed in their proper senses.

The passage is from Buridan's Questions on Porphyry's Isagoge, and the translation is lightly adapted from Jack Zupko's book John Buridan (pages 18-19), which I intend to mine for my next post as well. I find the passage noteworthy for two reasons. First, it shows that the right relationship between doctrinal or biblical formulations and scientific was not worked out under pressure of advancing modernity and the onslaught of independent empirical science, but by philosophy when science was still in its nascent stages and both philosophy and science were flourishing under the purview of the undivided Catholic university. The whole Galileo issue could have been resolved easily by reference to Buridan here (or one might add to any number of other doctors); the reasons it wasn't were cultural, political, and personal, rather than because the Catholic Church was stuck in "dark ages" thinking. The thinking of the high middle ages was in general much more sane, moderate, and temperate than most of that emanating from the post-Reformation battles.

The second thing that strikes me about this passage is its implicit condemnation of much of modern and postmodern academia, of which one besetting sin is its fascination with mining old texts in the service of contemporary "relevance." We can't read an old book properly unless we care about the same things its author cared about, but with our presentist solipsism, narrow-mindedness, and progressive triumphalism, scholars (as much as Hollywood screenwriters) are constantly tempted to read them primarily in the light of our own political, cultural, or ideological concerns. The other day I reread Tolkien's classic lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, which makes the same point, namely that Old English scholars had up until his day used the poem as a data mine for their own interests, without caring about what the poet cared about. The result was that the poem was devalued as scholars pined after the poems they wished had been written instead. Buridan's passage reminds me that you're not going to read Beowulf correctly if you think monsters are stupid and a waste of time, no matter how much you're interested in what it tells you about the Ingeld legend, Scyld Sheafing, or Geatish architecture. And it seems to me that classicists, medievalists, philosophers, scholars of all stripes fall prey to this data-mining temptation across the board.

Henry of Ghent on Aquinas and Existence

2011-09-10T16:38:00.006-04:00

For Thomists the "real distinction" between essence and existence is a bedrock principle of metaphysics. Often (e.g. Jacques Maritain in Preface to Metaphysics et al.) a Thomist will speak as though the real distinction is one of the first and most obvious metaphysical truths that can be known. It's one of the principal "Thomistic Theses" and St Thomas uses it constantly, for instance here, in Summa Theologiae I.104.1 (For the Latin see the Logic Museum):

Therefore as the becoming of a thing cannot continue when that action of the agent ceases which causes the "becoming" of the effect: so neither can the "being" of a thing continue after that action of the agent has ceased, which is the cause of the effect not only in "becoming" but also in "being." This is why hot water retains heat after the cessation of the fire's action; while, on the contrary, the air does not continue to be lit up, even for a moment, when the sun ceases to act upon it, because water is a matter susceptive of the fire's heat in the same way as it exists in the fire. Wherefore if it were to be reduced to the perfect form of fire, it would retain that form always; whereas if it has the form of fire imperfectly and inchoately, the heat will remain for a time only, by reason of the imperfect participation of the principle of heat. On the other hand, air is not of such a nature as to receive light in the same way as it exists in the sun, which is the principle of light. Therefore, since it has not root in the air, the light ceases with the action of the sun.

Now every creature may be compared to God, as the air is to the sun which enlightens it. For as the sun possesses light by its nature, and as the air is enlightened by sharing the sun's nature; so God alone is Being in virtue of His own Essence, since His Essence is His existence; whereas every creature has being by participation, so that its essence is not its existence. Therefore, as Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. iv, 12): "If the ruling power of God were withdrawn from His creatures, their nature would at once cease, and all nature would collapse." In the same work (Gen. ad lit. viii, 12) he says: "As the air becomes light by the presence of the sun, so is man enlightened by the presence of God, and in His absence returns at once to darkness."

Henry of Ghent paraphrases this passage in his Quodlibet I q.9, on whether a creature's essence is its being (my translation):

Those who say that in creatures the essence of a creature is one thing and its being another thing think that a creature participates in being. Whence they say that creatures are related to God as air to the sun illuminating it, for as the sun which shines by its nature, so that it is nothing other than light itself, so God has being through his nature and essence, for he is nothing other than being. And as air is of itself obscure, and of its nature is not altogether a participant in light unless it be illumined by the sun, participating through this light from the sun, so a creature of itself and of its essence does not have the character of being, but is in the darkness of nonentity, unless it be lightened by God and the being in which it participates be given to it.

After noting a different sense in which we might understand "participation", Henry goes on:

The first way of understanding the participation of a creature in being is mistaken; it is not an understanding but a phantastical imagination. For the essence of a creature should not be imagined like the air indifferent to obscurity and luminosity, but like a certain ray in itself apt to subsist, produced by the sun, not by the necessity of nature but by free will. Whence, if the sun by free will could produce a subsistent ray, that ray, inasmuch as its own nature is concerned, would be indifferent to being and non-being, and of itself would be a certain kind of non-being.

Henry goes on to explain the reason for the correction of St Thomas' image. In the image of the air being illumined by the sun the nature of the air is something different from the nature of the light or its illumination, whereas in a luminous body and the ray of light the nature of light is the same, though one light is dependent on and participates in the other. The ray which reaches our eye is not the same as the sun but is its similitude, as the creature is the similitude of God - but the air is not the similitude of the sun at all. (This seems to me to agree with the way Thomas elsewhere characterizes the essence of creatures as modes of imitability of the divine essence.) Thomas' image of the air's illumination is an image of one sort of thing being poured into another sort of thing to make it actual in a certain way, but for Henry (and, I might add, the Franciscan tradition in general along with him) existence can't be understood as a different sort of thing than the existing nature and added to it in order that it can be.

Of course, whether Henry's own account of the relation of essence and existence in terms of his intentional distinction is ultimately successful is another matter.

Self-Identity, Infinite Regress

2011-09-08T22:32:00.009-04:00

Identity is unity or union; either because the things which are said to be the same are plural in their being, and yet are called the same insofar as they agree in some one factor; or because they are one in their being, but the intellect treats them as though they are plural in order to think a relation. For a relation can only be thought to obtain between two extremes, as when something is said to be the same as itself; for then the intellect treats what is one in reality as though it were two; otherwise it could not designate a relation of something to itself. Wherefore it is clear that if a relation always requires two extremes, and in relations of this sort there are not two extremes in reality but only in the mind, the relation of identity is not a real relation but only a relation of reason . . . for if the relation of identity were some thing besides that which is called the same, that thing which is a relation, since it is the same as itself, for the same reason would have another relation which would be identical with itself, and on to infinity. But it is impossible to go to infinity in things. But in matters of the intellect nothing prohibits it. For when the intellect reflects on its acts it understands that it understands, and it can understand this as well, and so on to infinity.

--St Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics, Lib.V, lectio XI, par.912, my translation

A couple of thoughts about this passage. First, it's a good example of the fact that some of the "problems" that modern philosophy finds the most challenging and fascinating, such as the nature of self-identity, are for the classical and scholastic mind non-starters (the converse is also true, of course). In fact this disconnect between what modern thinkers find interesting or worth spilling gallons of ink on and what I find interesting and worth reading and thinking about is part of what makes reading much modern philosophy so difficult for me (it's rather like my reluctance to read contemporary fiction rather than classical and medieval poetry). Not only are modern philosophers frequently preoccupied with issues that to the classical mind seem rooted in silly misunderstandings, but those - to us - misunderstandings also seem to breed contempt for the kinds of thinking that I and the scholastics do find worthwhile. In any case, Aquinas is not alone here in finding nothing mysterious or profound about identity, since it's a mere relation of reason: what's difficult is understanding the being and the essence of a thing, not how that being is the same as itself. But, as I've claimed on this blog before, it seems to me that a lot of the absurdities of modern philosophers stem ultimately from an inability to tell the difference between real being and beings of reason.

A second, related, thought is that Thomas' point here not only makes use of an infinite regress argument, but is important for understanding infinite regress arguments in general. Anyone who's read much of the modern literature on arguments for the existence of God will know that the denial of the impossibility of an infinite regress is a favorite way for moderns to wiggle out of them. St Thomas' comments suggest that the reason an infinite regress, so obviously absurd to the scholastics, is unproblematic to the moderns, is (again) because moderns are not used to carefully distinguishing between real relations and relations of reason. And this is unsurprising, given that so much modern philosophy (and "science"), being born of Cartesian mathematicism, has been accustomed to axiomatically assuming that mathematical techniques are paradigmatic for philosophical (and "scientific") knowledge. But mathematical objects are indifferently divided between purified (i.e. denuded of what the Thomists always call material conditions) formal abstractions from experience and mere relations of reason, which happily sit on the number line together. Mathematics itself doesn't care about the distinction, but metaphysics must.

I believe this thought is suggested by Thomas here but it jumped out at me because it reminded me of a passage in John Deely's recent Medieval Philosophy Redefined, which I read a couple of months ago (the following is from page 268):

This contrast between relations in the physical order which depend upon actual characteristics of actual individuals (upon "subjective accidents of substances" in Aristotle's terms) and relations in the objective order which are not tied to actual subjective characteristics but may be founded upon whatever other relations happen to exist within a given cognition was the reason why Aristotle, and the Latin logicians after him, rejected arguments which led to an infinite regress. An infinite regress is actually possible only in the mind, because only in the mind can relations be founded upon relations. So any argument that involves an actual infinite regress, to the extent that it involves one, is an argument that has lost touch with the order of physical being as something to be explained through proper causes. For proper causes are found only within the physical interactions of finite substances, and these, as finite, are always determinate within the order of moved movers. . . .

Deely gives a further reference to his book The Human Use of Signs, which I have not read. In any case it's interesting to note that modern thinkers so often take the rejection of infinite regress as an arbitrary ad hoc principle whose only purpose is to force one to accept a First Cause, when the scholastics themselves not only see it as completely necessary and self-evident but also use it constantly in a host of nontheological contexts.

Grave Poems

2011-09-04T20:57:00.000-04:00

There's a grave for March,
one for Gwythur,
another for Gwgawn Redsword...

The grave of Arthur is a mystery.

From "Grave Poems" in the Black Book of Carmarthen (trans. M. Pennar, p.104).

Aureola

2011-08-25T23:52:00.004-04:00

In his Quodlibet II.12, Henry of Ghent was asked whether someone could obtain the halo given to Doctors in heaven if they were worthy to become professors of theology but never actually received a position.

No, it seems, for the judgment of the Church Triumphant conforms to the judgment of the Church Militant. If the Church on earth therefore doesn't see fit to honor a scholar with the rank of master, for which the halo specially belonging to Doctors is merited, neither will the Church in heaven.

Henry disagrees with this. One merits a halo in heaven (as one merits anything) on account of one's acts, not on account of public recognition of those acts or status. So a virgin will receive the halo of virginity even if her virtue is never recognized or lauded; similarly then so can someone who teaches and preaches in order to lead others to eternal life by the way of truth merit the halo of the Doctors.

Henry notes that it's not enough merely to wish to teach, a positive activity is required for merit; if one is impeded from teaching by one's locality or lack of opportunity one may receive the essential reward for one's good will, but not merit the halo. But if a qualified and worthy teacher who teaches well is not given a professorship [magisterium], this is an error on the part of the appointing body.

--------

I have to say that I find this quaestiuncula strangely comforting and cheering, as I hope others will who may, like me, doubt whether they can reasonably hope to be granted tenure by any other university than that whose gates St Peter guards, or wonder what college might accept us onto their permanent faculty besides that which resides in Dante's Heaven of the Sun.

Notes on Individuation

2011-08-23T14:55:00.007-04:00

After I ranted a bit in a personal exchange Faber suggested that I write up a bit on individuation. First a quick recap: here of course Faber reproduced a bit of Scotus on whether a relation can individuate. "Don Paco" of the blog Ite ad Thomam linked to it here, where commenter Aquinas 3000 asked what he thought of it. Don Paco replies,

I hold the Thomistic view: "The principle of individuation, i.e., of numerical distinction of one individual from another with the same specific nature, is matter designated by quantity. Thus in pure spirits there cannot be more than individual in the same specific nature." (Thesis 11, from the 24 Thomistic Theses).

So the soul is individuated through its body. This is the case, even when the soul no longer informs its body body: even then, this soul is still the soul (form) of that body (matter) and of no other.

On Edward Feser's blog Aquinas3000 puts the position this way:

The soul still has a relation to the body as it is the soul of this particular body. It also has its own separate act of esse. The matter individuates it as this particular human being. Once it is separate from the body it is no longer a human being as such, since this refers to the composite. It is an incomplete substance that is capable of subsisting due to its spiritual character that has a relation to this particular body i.e it is the soul of this body.

Some comments later our own Lee Faber replies:

So immaterial human souls have a different principle of individuation out of the body than in the body? So really for Thomas there are lots of principles. At one time it's matter, at another time it's a relation. But a relation requires two fundamenta. How can there be a relation to a non existent (the body)? All you've got is one term and a relation to nowheresville.

First of all I want to clear up the matter of the foundations of relations. Faber's remark, and Scotus' comment reproduced in the first post just cited, "every relative form presupposes something absolute in which it is founded," needs to be qualified. There can be a real relation with one nonexistent foundation, in the case of opinion, memory, anticipation, understanding, will, etc, regarding a non-existent, no-longer-existent, or not-yet-existent object. That is, there can be a real relation between something with subsistent (subjective) being - the mind - and something with merely objective being - the object which exists only in thought and not in itself. However, that's not really relevant to the present case.

In my view, which is the Scotist view, the Thomist account of individuation is involved in insuperable difficulties, which the case of the separated soul merely highlights. Consider the fact that the human body, upon decomposition, no longer exists, while ex hypothesi the human soul continues to exist apart from the body. The matter does not cease to exist, in the sense that prime matter is never naturally created or destroyed according to the principle of the conservation of energy; but individual bodies certainly do cease to exist. This flesh, this blood, these bones, these ashes, this carbon and oxygen, these electrons etc., can all dissembled into their components, be converted to energy and dissipated, and enter into composition with other matter and assume new forms and become new individual substances. This happens all the time. So "this body," the human body that the separated human soul once informed, ceases to exist. As Faber points out, the principle of individuation for an existing concrete substance cannot be something nonexistent, since no non-being can be the real principle of a being. But upon the decomposition of the body, "this" body no longer exists. According to the Thomists, therefore, the separated soul is individuated by something non-existent. But this is impossible, ergo etc.

Perhaps, however, the Thomists do not mean that the soul is individuated by this human body, but by the "signate matter" which individuated the body. So upon the destruction of the body, the "same" matter continues to exist, and the soul is individuated by its relation to this particular bit or chunk or amount of matter which, if it were informing it, would be its body. Sadly, however, this is no better. For the same quantity of matter, when it loses the form of "this" body, takes on some new form. It then becomes a new substance, "this(2)" body, which is numerically distinct from the first "this(1)" body. (Of course what really happens, and which I think strengthens the Scotist case, is that this quantity of matter enters into composition with an indefinite number of new bodies, but talking about it this way is simpler and clearer.) Then, according to the Thomists, this signate matter "this(0)" is the principle of individuation of "this(2)" body; but the principle of individuation for this soul "this(3)" is its relation to "this(1)" body, which is grounded in "this(0)" matter as well. So "this(0)" is the principle of individuation of both "this(2)" and "this(3)", through the latter's relation to the now-nonexistent "this(1)". This sure seems to imply that "this(2)" and "this(3)" are numerically identical, since they share a numerically identical concrete constitutive principle. This is, as a good scholastic would say, inconveniens.

However, a more fundamental objection to the Thomist account arises when we consider the famous Ship of Theseus problem. Any living organic substance, like a constantly repaired ship of Theseus, is constantly excreting old and absorbing new matter. They say - I don't know with how much truth - that we replace all our cells something like every seven years. (In any case particular quantities of matter are exchanged with my environment with every breath, effort, drink, bite, and trip to the restroom.) In that case every seven years all my proximate matter is replaced, and thus of course all my signate prime matter is replaced. But I am the same individual and my body is the same body as it was when I was an infant. Therefore signate matter is not the principle of individuation for my body. Are we really supposed to accept on anyone's authority, even that of a great saint such as St Thomas, that I only remain myself because somehow my body never excretes the little initial collection of atoms making up the chromosomal strings of the sperm and the egg that joined in my conception, and that that self same core of signate matter constitutes my individuality? The notion is absurd. What if that little core were surgically extracted? Clearly I would remain myself. The truth of the matter is that the continuity of the individual existence of any body is insured not by continuous possession of any given bit of matter, or of the whole quantity of its matter, but by the identity and continuity of its form. This is the case even for inanimate bodies, so that souls need not come into it at all. A lake is not individuated by its water; it remains the same lake even though fresh water is continually trickling in and out.

If you want to read more about individuation, the best Scotus texts are in Book VII of the Quaestiones Metaphysicae and in Book II, Dist. III of the Ordinatio, in both of which he discusses a vast range of possible positions and arguments. The best and most comprehensive secondary source is Individuation in Scholasticism, edited by Jorge Gracia. I haven't read all of the latter, I have to admit, despite meaning to get to it for some years now.

Scotus on whether Relations Individuate

2011-08-21T17:29:00.000-04:00

On the Thomistic view of individuation, matter is the individuating factor (or "signate" quantified matter depending on what work of Aquinas you happen to be reading). But this leaves a problem for Thomists in the case of human souls, which are supposed to subsist after death. For there is no matter remaining at all (Aquinas famously rejects spiritual matter). Consequently, we should expect subsistent human souls to be universals, or perhaps to be absorbed in the common nature of humanity (... but Aquinas thinks common natures have no being or unity...). Not so fast says the Thomist (or, if you prefer, the A-T theorist; this subject recently came up on Feser's blog), the soul still has a relation to its body. It is this relation that keeps the soul a particular (other Thomists have told me that the soul is individuated at the instant of its creation and just stays that way). Scotus rejects this line of thought in the passage I have translated below. This question is something of an embarrassment for Scotists of the strict observance (including the editors), for Scotus endorses spiritual matter (that old foolish doctrine that Thomas allegedly refuted for all time). Well, sort of. The following quote is labeled (without evidence) as "ad mentem Guilelmi de la Mare". For details on Scotus' views on spiritual matter (for example, who actually wrote the following section), see our co-blogger Michael's dissertation.

Duns Scotus, Quaestiones de anima, q. 15 n. 10-(Opera Philosophica V, 131-2):

I respond that probably [probabiliter] it can be said that there is matter in the soul, and this according to the Philosopher and those who posit the contrary. One [argument] is that the plurality of individuals in one species requires matter in those individuals, just as is clear from XII Metaphysics, where it is said " that there are not many in the same species moving heaven, because the first does not have matter." This is also clear from diverse [thinkers] positing matter to be the principle of individuation; but in the species of the rational soul there are many individuals, also when it is separated from the body; therefore, etc.

You might say, just as the contrary [party] does, that the soul has matter which it perfects or is made apt to perfect, namely the body. And by reason of the aptitude for diverse perfectible bodies, the [separated soul] can be plurified, not however does it have matter from which it is made.

Against them:

The soul does not exist on account of the body, but rather contrariwise; therefore neither is the distinction nor plurality of souls on account of the distinction of bodies, but rather contrariwise. Whence the Commentator VII Metaphysics says that the members of a lion differ from the members of a deer, because their souls differ; and not contrariwise.

Again, with the foundation or term of a relation destroyed, there is no relation; but that inclination or aptitude to the body is a certain relation; therefore, with the body destroyed after death, there is no inclination of the soul to the body.

The argument is confirmed: because there is no real relation of being to non-being, for relatives are simultaneous in nature; the soul is separated, not however the body which it informs; therefore, etc.

Again, if the distinction of souls is from the side of bodies only, God cannot create two souls without bodies; because there would not be distinguished by bodies, nor also by an inclination to a body; therefore, etc.

Again, every relative form presupposes something absolute in which it is founded; but that inclination to the body is a certain relative form founded in the essence of the soul which is so inclined; therefore the essence of the soul is prior to that inclination; the prior however is not distinguished by the posterior just as neither is it constituted by it, but rather contrariwise; therefore, etc.

Again, that inclination is not of the essence of the soul, because the soul is an absolute nature in itself; therefore it can be understood by an essential understanding [?? intellectu essentiali] without such an inclination, and consequently one is distinguished from another without an inclination to diverse bodies.

Again, because the soul is a 'this', therefore it has such an inclination to this body, not contrariwise; therefore, etc.

Edith Stein, Essential Being, and Henry of Ghent

2011-08-19T14:18:00.000-04:00

I was rather surprised last weekend to receive yet a third issue of the ACPQ in as many weeks (this is the one with Feser's article). I was even more surprised by the final article of the issue. I reproduce the abstract:

"Edith Stein and Medieval Metaphysics", Victor Salas Jr.

This essay considers Edith Stein's account of "essential being" and finds therein a point of continuity with medieval metaphysics. Scholarly attention has already been given to this feature of Stein's metaphysics; it has been argued that "essential being", while serving as a crucial point of distinction between Stein and Thomas Aquinas's own metaphysics, functions as a point of similarity between Stein and Duns Scotus. However, I argue that, while there are certainly many points of congruence between Stein and Scotus on the topic of essential being, the position that Stein advances comes much closer to Henry of Ghent's doctrine of esse essentiae. Fiinally, I show that the consequence of her adopting a position so similar to Henry of Ghent is that it opens stein to a number of criticisms raised by Scotus himself against esse essentiae.

I didn't read the article, though it did look fairly serious and scholarly. He cited the appropriate editions, etc., and showed himself to know about medieval thought in his discussion of Scotus, Godfrey and Henry. It is just a rather surprising revisionist project to adopt. But I suppose in the catholic world, Stein is a hot commodity right now (I seem to be constantly seeing announcements for conferences about her), so I suppose it makes sense. Her indebtedness to Scotus sometimes went off the rails, however. A cursory glance at her From Finite to Essential being reveals a reliance on spurious material she believed to be by Scotus (the de rerum principio). Consequently, she defended spiritual matter (which should make my co-blogger Michael happy).

All in all, itt was a nice surprise to see an article in the ACPQ which took Scotus seriously, rather than assigning him boogey-man status as is normally the case. I guess I could try my hand a being relevant as well: an essay about Lonergan's criticism of Scotus' formal distinction showing that Lonergan confuses Henry's intentional distinction with Scotus' formal distinction. Hmm...

Another item which caught my interest was an essay by David Schindler about Aquinas, Balthasar, and the Transcendentals. On p. 338 he claims that "This continuity within dissimilarity, or unity in every greater difference, is what the fourth Lateran Council defined as the essence of analogy." His emphasis. But of course this is ludicrous. The text is found in the Council's repudiation of the doctrine of Joachim of Fiore, and the quote in full is: "...quia inter creatorem et creaturam non potest tanta similitudo notari, quin inter eos major sit dissimilitudo notanda." This has on the surface nothing to do with the analogy of being, and certainly wasn't conceived as a definition of it. This misuse of the council's phrase is common among Thomists, however, though I thought this sort of thing had gone out of fashion. Schindler himself makes no more of this than what I have quoted, but the standard procedure among polemicists such as Garrigou-Lagrange was to maintain that Scotus violated every conciliar decree ever promulgated, and this text was one of their favorites. So it look's like we have the ghosts of the 60's still present.

Reflections on the 'Resurrection' of Medieval Philosophy

2011-08-19T13:44:00.002-04:00

Here. The comment about the "stifling" atmosphere that Catholic colleges create for the study of medieval philosophy made me laugh. Catholic colleges aren't interested in medieval philosophy any more than analytic philosophy departments. They just need an in-house pet Thomist that they can point to when the Magisterium comes a knockin'.

Popularity

2011-08-17T17:36:00.000-04:00

When I logged into the blog today a window popped up with a statement to the effect of "It looks like your blog is popular! Why not Monetize!" I find the idea that The Smithy is getting popular somewhat dubious as our all time highs this spring were just around a 100 hits a day, and have recently plummeted to a mere 50. But, anyway, thanks for reading.

Giraldus Odonis' Marian Miracle

2011-08-16T21:36:00.000-04:00

G.O. is getting hotter these days, so this quote is probably well known. But for those who don't know about the circumstances of his conversion to the immaculatist position, here's the story:

Henrici de Werla Opera Omnia I, p. 93:

Sextum [miraculum], venerabilis doctor Giraldus Odonis Ordinis Minorum, cum semel diutius contra Virginem protraxisset, finito sermone missam suam devotissime celebrans elevatione corporis Christi facta eadem Virgo sibi praesentialiter apparens et speciebus panis ab altari sublatis torvo et crudeli oculo: "qua fronte, inquit, inique frater, corpus de me sumptum sumere vis, quam hodie verbis et factis voluntarie maculasti!" Ipse autem cum gemitibus petente veniam Eucharistia sibi reddita missam finivit et immediate ascendens pulpitum, quod in primo sermone contra Virginem praedicaverat revocans et miraculum longe referens, valde solemnem sermonem fecit.

The sixth miracle, the venerable doctor Giraldus Odonis of the friars minor, when once he had inveighed against the Virgin for a while, after his sermon was finished and he was devotedly celebrating mass, at the elevation of the body of Christ, the same Virgin appeared presentially and with the species of bread lifted from the alter regarded him with a harsh and stern eye: "With what face, wicked brother, do you wish to take the body taken from me, which today you have willfully stained with words and deeds!" He however with groans begged pardon, and with the Eucharist returned to him, finished mass and immediately ascending the pulpit, which in the first sermon he had preached against the Virgin, he retracted and for a long time related the miracle, making a very solemn speech.

Marenbon on Textual Editions

2011-08-15T16:13:00.000-04:00

The following is from a flyer for the Auctores Britannici series from the British academy, via Brunellus (but I can't remember where). It was written by John Marenbon

Scholarly editing

Bringing a work like Anselm’s or Wylton’s into the form of an

accessible, edited, printed text is an extraordinarily time-consuming

and skilled job. First, the manuscripts must be transcribed. Whilst

scribes in the earlier Middle Ages used an easily-readable form of

handwriting that was revived in the Renaissance and provided the

model for print, most medieval philosophical manuscripts are

written in difficult to decipher Gothic and late medieval scripts.

Since parchment and then paper was precious, the hands are often

tiny; and a complex system of abbreviations was used to save more

space. Only someone specially trained in the reading of medieval

handwriting, with an excellent command of Latin, and who also

fully understands the often highly technical discussions in the text

can set about the task. Usually, there will be more than one

manuscript, and often dozens. They are rarely authorial autographs,

and so the editor needs to collate and classify the manuscripts, so as

to reconstruct as well as possible the text the author intended. And

then, if the text is to be accessible and useful, the sources it uses and

references it makes must be sought out, a translation provided, and

an introduction written on the work’s context and contents.

Unfortunately, universities and funding bodies in Britain today seem

blind both to the fundamental value of such editions for scholarship

and to the extraordinary skills needed in those who make them. Any

genuine scholar of the Middle Ages, even one not personally

inclined to text-editing, recognises that, without new editions,

scholarship in the area is condemned to try to build without

foundations, and that editing a text is one of the supreme tests of a

medievalist’s training and ability. Yet officially far less credit is given

for the years of patient work required to produce a good edition than

to a few articles or a monograph that catch a fashionable theme and

will probably no longer be read in a few years – whereas a good

edition can still be useful a century later. It is a tribute to a certain

self-sacrificing integrity that so many scholars continue to come

forward to make available, through their painstaking work, more of

the philosophical heritage of medieval Britain – but sad that so few

of them have been trained or work in this country.

Duns Scotus Opera Omnia Vol. 13 Now Available!

2011-08-14T19:21:00.002-04:00

Here.

Ioannis Duns Scoti Opera Omnia Tom. XIII Ordinatio. Liber Quartus. Distinctiones 14-42. Città del Vaticano, 2011 ISBN 978-88-7013-313-4

Get it now, while supplies last, for a cool 190 euros.

Scotus on the Soul, Immortality, and Resurrection

2011-08-10T16:42:00.002-04:00

A segment of the blogosphere has been ablaze of late with discussion of the soul and whether hyle/o-morphic dualism is inconsistent. See for this Dr. Feser's blog, and his links to the Maverick Philosopher. Scotus holds to hylemorphic dualism like most other scholastics, with the twist that he does not accept the unicity of substantial form thesis (though that does not enter into the discussion quoted below), holding instead that there are two substantial forms in the human composite. In the following selection, Scotus examines a bad version of the Aristotelian-Thomistic argument for the immateriality of the intellect based on the fact that it is not the act of a bodily organ. He also gives a better version and subjects it to analysis.

Scotus' question is about the general resurrection. Specifically, "Can it be known by natural reason that there will be a general resurrection of mankind?" His procedure is to evaluate whether three propositions can be proven by means of a priori or a posteriori arguments:

1. The Intellective Soul is the Specific Form of Man

2. The Intellective Soul is Immortal

3. The Human Soul will not Remain Outside the Body Forever

In the end, Scotus will argue that propositions 2 and 3 cannot be proven demonstratively by natural reason, that instead they admit of only probable arguments.

In what follows, I will be using Wolter's translation as found in Duns Scotus Philosophical Writings, which, in the absence of a critical edition, corrects the Wadding edition against the Assisi 137 manuscript. These will only short selections.

Ordinatio IV d. 43 q. 2 (Wolter, pp. 133-62):

[About prop. 1, after several authorities there is a proof from reason]

As to the second, it is not easy to find either an a priori or an a posteriori argument, unless it be based on a function proper to man, for the form is known from its proper function, even as matter is known from the existence of change.

One argument based on the function of the intellect that is used to establish the proposed conclusion is this. To understand is a function proper to man. Therefore, it has its source in the form proper to man. The intellective form then is that proper to man.

This argument, however, is open to criticism inasmuch as those who propound it admit that the intellect has only a passive and not an active relation to intellection. Hence, this proposition 'A function that is proper proceeds from the proper form' really does not prove that the intellective part is the proper form of man, for this operation does not proceed from the form but according to them it is caused by the intelligible object, or according to the view of others it proceeds from the sense image.

I put this argument, then, in another form. Man formally and properly understands; therefore the intellective soul is the proper form of man.

[...]

...we should try to prove the antecedent by reason lest some contentious individual deny it. Now in the antecedent, I take 'to know' or 'to understand' in the proper sense of the term as an act of knowledge which transcends every type of sense knowledge.

One way of proving this antecedent, then, is this. Man knows by an act of knowledge which is not organic; hence he knows or understands in the proper sense of the term. The consequence is evident for the reason already given, since intellection properly speaking is a knowledge which transcends all sense knowledge. All sensation, however, is organic knowledge as Aristotle shows in De anima, Bk. II. There the antecedent of this enthymeme is proved from the fact that every organ is determined to a certain kind of sensible, and this because it consists in a balance between two extremes. But we do experience in ourselves some knowledge which we do not have in virtue of some organ, for if it were organic, this knowledge would be limited precisely to the sensibles of some determined kind, which is the very opposite of what we actually experience. For by such an act we know precisely how one kind of sensible differs from another, and conseqently we know both extremes. This consequence is evident from the Philosopher, who uses this argument in De anima bk. II, in regard to common sense.

[...]

[Second proof] Another proof for the principal antecedent is based on the fact that we possess some immaterial knowledge. No sense knowledge, however, can be immaterial; therefore, etc.

This word 'immaterial' is frequently used by the Philosopher in this connection, but it appears to be ambiguous. There are three relevant ways in which it can be understood. (a) Either this knowledge is immaterial because it is incorporeal in the sense that it is not an operation that involves a corporeal part or organ. In this sense, the present proposition is the same as that previously posited with regard to non-organic knowledge. (b) Another way in which this knowledge could be immaterial would be that it is not extended in any way. In this case much more is asserted than the fact that it is not organic. For although everything organic is extended inasmuch as it is received into something extended [viz. the organ], this is not the only reason. It would still be extended if it were received immediately by the composite as a whole,a because the composite itself is extended. (c) Immateriality can be understood in a third sense, namely with reference to the object, inasmuch as this knowledge considers the object under immaterial aspects, as for instance, abstracting from the 'here and now' and such like, which are said to be material conditions. If we would prove this knowledge to be immaterial in the second sense and not merely in the first our proposed conclusion would follow all the more. But it seems that the only way we could do this would be from the conditions which characterise the object of such an act (unless perhaps we could do so on the basis of reflection, since we experience ourselves reflecting on this act of knowledge, for what has quantity is not capable of reflecting upon itself). At an rate the proof of the antecedent ultimately rests upon the object of this act.

The proof is as follows. We possess some knowledge of an object under an aspect it could not have as an object of sense knowledge; therefore etc. [various proofs of the antecedent and consequent follow]

[one proof of the principal consequent is as follows] We can prove the same from the second operation characteristic of man, namely volition, for man is master of his acts to such an extent that it is within his power to determine himself at will to this or to its opposite ... And this is something known by natural reason and not merely by faith. Such a lack of determination, however, cannot exist in any organic or extended appetite, because every organic or material appetite is determined to a certain class of suitable objects so that what is apprehended cannot be unsuitable nor can the appetite fail to seek it. The will, therefore, by which we can will in such an indeterminate way, is not the appetite of a material form, and in consequence it belongs to something which excels every such form. But this is just what we assume the intellective form to be. And therefore, if this appetite is formally in us inasmuch as its act is in us, it follows that this form is our form.

[Concerning prop. 2. Various arguments and authorities for and against immortality follow]

[arg. 5] Also, some arguments can be constructed from the dicta of the Philosopher. One of his principles is that a natural desire is not in vain. Now the soul has a natural desire to exist forever.

[...]

It can be stated that although there are probable reasons for this second proposition, these are not demonstrative, nor for that matter are they even necessary reasons.

[...]

Another answer, and one more in accord with facts, is that not all the statements by the philosophers were established by proofs both necessary and evident to natural reason. Frequently, what they gave was nothing more than rather persuasive probable arguments or what was commonly held by earlier philosophers... Hence, in those matters where they could find nothing better without contradicting the principles of philosophy, 'slight indications' frequently had to suffice for the philosophers. ... Therefore the philosophers agreed to things sometimes because of probable persuasive reasons, at other times because they had asserted as principles, propositions which were not necessary truths. And this reply would suffice for all the testimonies cited above; even if they clearly asserted the proposed conclusion, they still do not establish it. nevertheless, these arguments can be answered in order as follows.

[To 1] To the first: Aristotle understands this separation to mean nothing more than that the intellect does not use the body in performing its operation, and for this reason it is incorruptible as to function. This is not to be understood in the sense that it is unlike an organic power which perishes precisely because the organ decays. this type of decay pertains exclusively to an organic faculty... Hence, the faculty of vision grows weak or decays only from the standpoint of its organ and not in so far as its operation directly is concerned. From the fact that the intellect, however, is incapable of decay in the sense that it has no organ by which it could perish, it does not follow that the intellect is imperishable as to function in an unqualified sense, for then it would indeed follow that tis also imperishable in being as the argument maintains. What does follow is this. So far as its ability to operate alone is concerned, the intellect is incapable of dissolution in the same sense that an organic power is corruptible. Absolutely speaking, however, the intellect is assumed to be perishable according to the Philosopher's statement in De anima bk. III, that the intellect perishes in us once the interior sense perishes. And this is just what one would have to maintain if he assumed the soul to be a principle which ash an operation proper to the composite as a whole. The composite, however, is perishable. Consequently, its operative principle is also perishable. That the soul is the operative principle of thew hole composite and that its operation is also that of the while is just what Aristotle seems to say in De anima, bk. I

[to 5] The other argument about the natural desire will be answered in the reply to the initial arguments, for the first three proceed from this notion.

[Concerning prop. 3] So far as this proposition is concerned, it seems that if the Philosopher had assumed the soul to be immortal, he would have held that it continued to exist outside the body rather than in the body, for everything composed can be destroyed by its contraries.

[Evaluation of the a priori proof] Of the three propositions used to construct a kind of a priori argument in the sense that the proof is based on the nature of the form of man that is to be restored, I say that the first is known by natural reason and that the contrary error, which is proper to Averroes only, is of the very worst kind. Not only is it opposed to theological truth but to philosophical truth as well. For it destroys knowledge itself inasmuch as it denies any act of knowledge distinct from sensation or any act of choice distinct from sense appetite and hence does away with all those virtues which require an act of choice in accord with right reason. One who errs in this way, consequently, should be banished from the company of men who use natural reason.

The other two propositions, however, are not known adequately from natural reason even though there are a number of probable persuasive arguments in their favour. The reasons for the second, indeed, are more numerous as well as more highly probable. For this reason, the Philosopher appears to have held this doctrine more expressly. For the third, however, the reasons are fewer. The conclusion, then, which follows from these three propositions is not sufficiently known a priori by natural reason.

[The a posteriori proofs]

The second way to prove the resurrection is by a posteriori arguments. Some probable arguments of this kind were mentioned in the initial arguments, for instance, those concerning the happiness of man. To the latter this argument based on the justice of a rewarding God is added. In the present life the virtuous suffer more punishments than those who are wicked. It is this line of argument that the Apostle seems to have in mind in the first letter to the Corinthians: "If with this life only in view we have had hope in Christ, we are of all men the most to be pitied," etc.

[Evaluation of the a postiori arguments] These a posteriori arguments, however, are even less conclusive than the a priori proof based on the proper form of man, since it is not clear from natural reason that there is one ruler who governs all men according to the laws of retributive and punitive justice. It could also be said that the good act is itself sufficient reward for anyone... Such arguments are nothing else than probable persuasive proofs, or they are reasons derived from premises that are matters of belief, as is evident if we examine them individually.

[Solution to the Question] to put it briefly, then, we can maintain that natural reason cannot prove that the resurrection is necessary, neither by way of a priori reasons such as those based on the notion of an intrinsic principle in man, nor by a posteriori arguments, for instance, by reason of some operation or perfection fitting to man. Hence we hold the resurrection to be certain on the basis of faith alone.

[Reply to the Initial Arguments. arg. 1] to the first argument: If the argument is based on the notion of natural desire taken in an exact and proper sense, and a natural desire in this sense is not an elicited act but merely an inclination of nature towards something, then it is clear that the existence of such a natural desire for anything can be proved only if we prove first that the nature in question is able to have such a thing. To argue the other way round, therefore, is begging the question. Or if natural desire is taken in a less proper sense, viz. as an act elicited in conformity with the natural inclination, we are still unable to prove that any elicited desire is natural in this sense without first proving the existence of a natural desire in the proper sense of the term.

But suppose that someone were to argue that whatever is immediately desired, once it is known, is something that is desired naturally, since such proneness seems to arise only from some natural inclination. One answer to this objection would be to deny the first statement, since a person with bad habits is inclined to desire immediately whatever is in accord with these habits just as soon as such a thing presents itself. However, if nothing else intervenes, nature of itself is not vicious; neither is it vicious in everyone. Consequently, if everyone immediately desires such a thing as soon as he knows of it, it would follow that the desire in this case is not vicious. The first answer to this objection, then, is not adequate. Therefore it could be answered like this. We must show that such knowledge is not erroneous but is in accord with right reason. Otherwise, it does not follow that just because everyone, on the basis of an erroneous conception, were immediately to elicit an act of desire, this desire is in accord with an inclination of nature. Indeed, it is rather the opposite that follows. Now it is not clear by natural reason that the argument establishing eternal existence as something desirable is not erroneous, since man must first be shown to be capable of such a thing.

To put it briefly, then, every argument based on natural desire seems to be inconclusive, for to construct an efficacious argument, it would be necessary to show either that nature possesses a natural potency for eternal life, or that the knowledge which immediately gives rise to this desire, where the latter is an elicited act, is not erroneous but in accord with right reason. Now the first of these alternatives is the same as the conclusion to be established. The second is more difficult to prove and is even less evident than the conclusion.

As for the proof that man has a natural desire for immortality because he naturally shuns death, it can be said that this proof applies to the brute animal as well as to man.

News

2011-08-02T18:05:00.000-04:00

According to this NEH pdf, The American scholars who are going to be editing Duns Scotus' Reportationes have won their grant; this is excellent news.

Also, on the same announcement, Rega Wood has won funds to edit Richard Rufus of Cornwall's Scriptum super Metaphysicam.

Finally, I would like to call our readers' attention to the current volume of the ACPQ, which is devoted to Bonaventure. There is a nice variety of articles to delight the reader, from textual studies on the De reductione to engagement with Milbank and contemporary theology.

William of Alnwick on Virtual Containment

2011-07-23T21:43:00.001-04:00

Here are some lines from Scotus' secretary Guillelmus de Alnwick on virtual containment, a development of Scotus' theory of unitive containment, which in turn is rooted in the pseudo-Denys. In Scotus' writings, the notion appears during his Parisian period, that is, from 1302. In this passage, William also lays out most of the causal theory assumed by the scholastics. Note that we are not talking about how the divine attributes are in God, but how creatures and the perfections of creatures are contained in God.

Guillelmus de Alnwick, Quodlibet q. 8 (ed. Ledoux, BFS 10, 445-6):

The third question concerning the containment of the perfections of creatures in God is that, namely, whether the perfections of creatures, inasmuch as they are contained in God, are virtually distinguished from God and among themselves formally or intentionally from the nature of the thing.

Concerning the solution of that question I proceed thus: first I will declare what it is to contain another and to be contained by another virtually, second I will show that creatures, inasmuch as they are contained in God virtually, according to their contained perfection, are distinguished from God formally and really, third, I will show that the perfections of creatures, inasmuch as they are virtually contained in God, according to the perfection of the containing [being], are not distinguished from God formally or really, fourth, the arguments of the contrary opinion will be refuted.

[art. 1]

As far as the first is concerned, it should be known that to contain something virtually is to have the perfection and the nature of the contained in its own power or effective causality. For power is ordered to operation and action, and therefore what contains another and not in effective causality does not contain it virtually, although it may contain it eminently, just as a final cause, or in the fashion of an exemplar, just as an exemplar form, or potentially, just as a material cause. Therefore only the effective cause of some effect contains properly virtually that effect, through whose power such an effect is produceable and conservable. An effective cause is twofold, namely univocal and equivocal. An effective univocal cause contains its effect virtually in the power adequate to the effect. Whence a univocal cause contains its effect adequately, because the perfection of a univocal cause does not exceed its effect in perfection. An effective equivocal cause contains its effect virtually in excessive power, because it contains the effect in its power with an excess of perfection. God however with respect to the caused is an equivocal cause and does not properly contain all creatures virtually, because he contains their perfections in his effective power with an infinite excess.

So, nevertheless, to contain some effect virtually, whether by univocal power or equivocal, comes about doubly: in one mode rootedly [radicaliter], just as a remote cause, in another mode sufficiently, just as a proximate, complete and ultimated [ultimata] cause. In the first mode the divine essence contains the perfections of creatures virtually, because rootedly and quasi remotely. For the divine essence is the root of all perfections in God and of the divine power, whether ad intra or ad extra, just as an infinite sea of perfection, because the divine essence, inasmuch as it is distinguished against other perfections in God, does not immediately produce a creature; for if so it would produce a creature in the mode of nature. Therefore the divine essence is not a quasi proximate power for producing an effect, nor consequently does it contain the effect virtually in proximate power. On account of the same, the divine knowledge and the divine intellect contain a creature virtually not in proximate power and executive power, but in dispositive power, and so in a certain way it contains a creature in its power remotely and not proximately [de proximo]. But creatures are contained virtually in the divine will in proximate and executive power, because, according to Augustine III De trinitate cap. 6, "the divine will is the highest cause of all", for its efficacious willing is to produce a creature. Whence the divine will virtually contains the perfection of whatsoever creature in proximate and immediate power, and therefore the divine will properly is said to contain all creatures virtually.

According to this it is clear what it means to be contained in something virtually, because it is to be contained in its causative power according to its total causal being [??] and because the first cause is the effective cause of all others than itself, therefore all others are contained in the effective power of the first cause, for every effect is either immediately caused by the first cause or by a second cause, one or many. If the first way, since whatever perfection there is in the effect necessarily is in the total cause, otherwise there would be something of perfection in a creature which would not be caused, it follows that every effect immediately from the first cause according to its total causal being is contained in its [the first cause's] causative power. If however it is caused immediately by a second cause, one or many, since the causative power of the second cause is contained in the power of the first cause, otherwise the second cause would not be the second, but the first, it follows that every effect caused by the second cause, univocal or equivocal, one or many, is contained in the effective power of the first cause, and consequently that all other beings than the first cause are contained virtually in the first cause.

Pius XII on Luke Wadding

2011-07-20T18:45:00.002-04:00

Here.

William of Ware Joke

2011-07-02T02:53:00.000-04:00

Here. I don't know what is more shocking: that someone did a post on William of Ware or that they were able to joke about his name.

Leibniz on Parsimony

2011-06-21T15:42:00.000-04:00

Theodicy, Essays on the Justice of God... pt. 2, n. 124:

To multiply one and the same thing only would be superfluity, and poverty too. To have a thousand well-bound Vergils in one's library, always to sing the airs from the opera of Cadmus and Hermione, to break all the china in order only to have cups of gold, to have only diamond buttons, to eat nothing but partridges, to drink only Hungarian or Shiraz wine--would one call that reason?

Does Existence have a Quiddity?

2011-06-18T19:06:00.001-04:00

Below are some thoughts from Alexander of Alexandria's Quodlibet. For those of you who don't know, Alex was a Franciscan theologian who lectured on the Sentences just after Scotus, in 1306-1307. The question excerpted below is about intuitive cognition, which Alexander extends to a discussion of divine foreknowledge.

Alexander de Alexandria, Quodlibet, q. 9 a. 2 (London, British Library, Ms. Add. 14077, ff. 158? I can't remember).

... quod Deus cognoscat hoc fore in tali instanti difficle est videre

Quidam enim dicunt quod hec est quia Deus est suum esse et ideo cognoscendo suum esse cognoscit existere cuiuscumque [rei].

Hoc dictum primo videtur dubium, nulla enim consequentia videtur esse 'Deus est suum esse, ergo cognoscit existentiam cuiuscumque rei' nisi aliter probaretur.

Secundo videtur dubium quia supponunt unum quod non est concessum ab omnibus, scilicet quod in omni creatura differt esse et essentia, in solo autem Deo est indifferens unum ab alio.

Tertio quia et si Deus videndo suum esse videat existentiam cuiuslibet rei, inquantum existentia est quedam quidditas et hec esse quidditativa; possumus enim dicere quod existere est quedam quidditas, quia potest dari aliquis conceptus de eo, tamen quod cognoscendo suum esse cognoscat hoc fore in tali instanti est dubium, cum hec dependeat a voluntate divina. Ideo enim hoc erit quia Deus vult hec esse.

Alii dicunt quod Deus cognoscendo essentiam suum vel ydeam alicuius rei cognoscit hoc fore.

Sed hoc est ita dubium sicut primum, quia ydea ut ydea, ut videtur, aspicit proprie esse quidditativum et quid est hec et non aspicit fore vel non fore; erit ideo completa contingentia per eam non cognoscuntur, licet enim per ydeam hominis cognoscitur homo et per ydeam certus? cognoscatur cursus, tamen per istam ydeam non cosnoscetur istud hoc curret nisi aliud concurreret. Posset ergo dici sicut alias dixi quod Deus hoc cognoscit cognoscendo determinationem sue voluntatis, quod autem scientia talium aliquo modo dependeat a voluntate patet: certum est enim secundum omnes quod Deus non necessario vult ea que sunt ad finem, non enim necessario vult a fore. Si autem non necessario vult, sequitur quod potest velle et nolle. Si autem potest velle et nolle, potest scire et non scire et totum sine mutatione sui, sicut habet declarari in tractatu de prescientia de sedero tantum? de sedeo?

Translation:

... it is difficult to see that God knows this to be in such an instant.

Some [idiots] say that this is because God is his own being [or, 'act of being' or 'existence'] and therefore by knowing his own being he knows the existence of everything else.

This statement seems doubtful, first, for 'God is his own being, therefore he knows the existence of every other thing' does not seem to be a valid consequence unless it be proved in some other way.

Second, it seems doubtful because they presuppose something which is not granted by all, namely, that esse and essence differ in every creature, and in God alone is one indifferent with respect to the other.

Third, because even if God by seeing his own esse would see the existence of every other thing, insofar as existence is a certain quiddity and quidditative esse, for we can say that existence is a certain quiddity because a concept of it can be granted, nevertheless that by knowing his own esse he knows this to be in such an instant is doubtful, since this depends on the divine will. Therefore, this will be because God wills this to be.

Other [idiots] say that God knows this to be by knowing his own essence or the idea of something.

But this is doubtful just as was the first, because idea as idea, as it seems, is directed toward quidditative esse properly and what something is and does not consider something to be or not to be; therefore the complete contingency[?] is not known through it, for although man is known through the idea of man, and through the idea of running a runner is known, nevertheless that this one runs is not known through the idea unless the other concur. Therefore it can be said, as I have said elsewhere, that God knows this to be by knowing the determination of his will; that however the knowledge of such things depends on the will in some way is clear: for it is certain according to all that God does not will necessarily those things which are for the end, for he does not will necessarily that a will be. If however he does not will necessarily, it follows that he is able to will and not-will. If however he can will and not-will, he can know and not know the total [creature?] without any change in himself, as I have to declare in my treatise on foreknowledge...

Todd Bates

2011-06-18T02:27:00.000-04:00

In case you haven't already heard, Todd Bates recently died. See Brandon Watson's blog for details. Bates was a contributor to the Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus and recently published a book on Scotus' theory of universals.

The Franciscan Convent at Avignon

2011-06-13T01:31:00.000-04:00

About three years ago there was a conference at Notre Dame on the subject of the studia of the religious orders and the papal court of Avignon (the proceedings may be out soon, I hear). There were some talks about the papal court and the Dominican studium at Avignon, but nothing about the Franciscan house. I haven't looked much into this yet (and I would prefer if someone else did the looking; I have enough projects at the moment), but perhaps this was because there was no studium proper, just a convent where friars passing through town and visiting the papal court happened to stay. But surely there was a library? My pet theory is that the pseudo-Franciscus de Mayronis Formalitates treatise was composed at Avignon, for, if there was a library, it would make sense if it contained the works of both Francis of Meyronnes and Petrus Thomae.

From a brief run through the Noone-Gracia companion to Medieval philosophy I have compiled the following list of friars who might have stayed at the house (except of course Petrus Thomae, who was not included in said companion).

1322-1346: John of Reading
1323-1328: Francis of Meyronnes (probably in and out various times)
1324-1328: Francis of Marchia
? - 1328: William of Ockham
1330?-1333: William of Alnwick
1332?-1339: Petrus Thomae (carted off to jail in 1339, died 1340)
1333-1343: Walter Chatton

With the exception of Ockham, I think all of these Franciscans had finished their major works by the time they would have been in Avignon. So there would have been a collection of major thinkers (well, for the early fourteenth century), in their prime, sitting around the house waiting for their day in court or whatever. I wonder what the dinner conversation was.

Dionysian Scotism

2011-06-11T23:42:00.038-04:00

A common complaint against Duns Scotus is that he is at odds with the Christian tradition, which, depending on the author can mean something as simple as Thomism, or as broad as the Fathers, the Nicene creed, or Christian Platonism. One also meets attempts to classify Scotus in terms of the dominant -isms of the late thirteenth century (for example, avicennizing-aristotelianism). I'm thinking now of pseudo-Denys; I don't think I have ever seen anyone classify Scotus as Dionysian. It is true that one rarely meets with citations of the pseudo-Dyonisius in Scotus' works. Yet Scotus owes at least one significant doctrine to pseudo-Denys, that of unitive containment, which is based on the notion that God pre-eminently contains the perfections of creatures within himself, albeit in a higher and ineffable way. But the relative paucity of citations is not true of the works of Scotus' followers. I was struck by the prevalence of Denys-citations recently while reading three very different Scotists: Francis of Meyronnes, Petrus Thomae, and William of Alnwick. Petrus Thomae is constantly citing pseudo-Denys in his Quaestiones de ente, although interestingly they do not appear at all in his Quaestiones de esse intelligibili. In the case of Alnwick, questions 6-8 of his Quodlibet are basically and extensive defense and explanation of unitive containment and the Dionysian principle of pre-eminent containment.

So the modest contribution of this blogpost is that we have an important -ism to add to our taxonomy of Scotism: Dionysianism.

Leibniz on the Will and Possible Worlds

2011-06-10T23:41:00.000-04:00

Another Leibniz post. Apologies to all the hardcore medievalists out there. Leibniz strikes me as having a pretty weak account of the will in general (mainly, he is pretty vague whether the will is a power or appetite/inclination and is unclear on the relation between the will and acts of willing; plus, if, as is his wont, the soul just is thinking, what is the relation between willing and thinking?). I found the following quote interesting, mainly because he was so uncharacteristically explicit.

Theodicy, p. 151:

51. As for the volition itself, to say that it is an object of free will is incorrect. We will to act, strictly speaking, and we do not will to will; else we could still say that we will to have the will to will, and that would go on to infinity. Besides, we do not always follow the latest judgement of practical understanding when we resolve to will; but we always follow, in our willing, the result of all the inclinations that come from the direction both of reasons and passions, and this often happens without n express judgement of the understanding.

52. All is therefore certain and determined beforehand in man, as everywhere else, and the human soul is a kind of spiritual automaton, although contingent actions in general and free action in particular are not on that account necessary with an absolute necessity, which would be truly incompatible with contingency. Thus neither futurition in itself, certain as it is, nor the infallible prevision of God, nor the predetermination either of causes or of God's decrees destroys this contingency and this freedom; That is acknowledged in respect of futurition and prevision, as has already been set forth. Since, moreover, God's decree consists solely in the resolution he forms, after having compared all possible worlds, to choose what one which is the best, and bring it into existence together with all that this world contains, by means of the all-powerful word Fiat, it is plain to see that this decree changes nothing in the constitution of things: God leaves them must as they were in the state of mere possibility, that is, changing nothing either in their essence or nature, or even in their accidents, which are represented perfectly already in the idea of this possible world. Thus that which is contingent and free remains no less so under the decrees of God than under his prevision.

Scotus, and his Sequelae, would ask what the origin of these possible worlds is. Do they originate in the divine intellect, or are they eternally represented by the essence, or what? Elsewhere Leibniz made the odd claim that the divine ideas are represented by the divine intellect, but what could that mean? If the divine intellect does the representing, what is perceiving the representation? Generally, ideas, or the things that there are ideas of, are represented to the intellect, that is, if one is going to use representation at all in conjunction with the divine ideas. One question we might want to ask Leibniz is if the essences of possible things are eternal, since God does not alter their essences or apparently generate them. But if they are eternal, are they then divine or necessary, and doesn't this posit a plurality, indeed an infinity, of eternal beings?

Leibniz on the History of the Faith-Reason Problem

2011-06-03T00:37:00.000-04:00

From his Theodicy, preliminary discourse, p. 76-77 (Newhaven 1952):

The question of the conformity of faith with reason has always been a great problem. In the primitive Church the ablest Christian authors adapted themselves to the ideas of the Platonists, which were the most acceptable to them, and were at that time most generally in favor. Little by little Aristotle took the place of Plato, when the taste for systems began to prevail, and when theology itself became more systematic, owing to the decisions of the General Councils, which provided precise and positive formularies. St. Augustine, Boethius and Cassiodorus in the West, and St. John of Damascus in the East contributed most towards reducing theology to scientific form, not to mention Bede, Alcuin, St. Anselm and some other theologians versed in philosophy. Finally came the Schoolmen. The leisure of the cloisters giving full scope for speculation, which was assisted by Aristotle's philosophy translated from the Arabic, there was formed at last a compound of theology and philosophy wherein most of the questions arose from the trouble that was taken to reconcile faith with reason. But this had not met with the full success hoped for, because theology had been much corrupted by the unhappiness of the times, by ignorance and obstinacy. Moreover, philosophy, in addition to its own faults, which were very great, found itself burdened with those of theology, which in its turn was suffering from association with a philosophy that was very obscure and very imperfect. One must confess, notwithstanding, with the incomparable Grotius, that there is sometimes gold hidden under the rubbish of the monks' barbarous Latin. I have therefore oft times wished that a man of talent, whose office had necessitated his learning the language of the Schoolmen, had chosen to extract thence whatever is of worth, and that another Petau or Thomasius had done in respect of the Schoolmen what these two learned men had done in respect of the Fathers. It would be a very curious work, and very important for ecclesiastical history, and it would continue the History of Dogmas up to the time of the Revival of Letters (owing to which the aspect of things has changed) and even beyond that point. For sundry dogmas, such as those of physical predetermination, of mediate knowledge, philosophical sin, objective precisions, and many other dogmas in speculative theology and even in the practical theology of cases of conscience, came into currency even after the Council of Trent.

Cajetan on Scotus

2011-06-02T17:44:00.001-04:00

Be sure to check out James Chastek's post on Thomism and Scotism over at Just Thomism. The topic is Scotus' argument that the personal properties of the Trinitarian persons are formally distinct from the divine essence (though Cajetan reads this as 'really' distinct, perhaps uncharitably) because the property of paternity is communicable and the essence is not. Cajetan's response is to deny the principle of excluded middle as applied to God in the hard sense of 'real' as well as a few other red herrings. His point that there is only one formal ratio in this sense of real is similar to the points that Pierre Roger argues in the Disputatio I've been blogging about.

Subordination to Metaphysics

2011-06-01T10:22:00.003-04:00

Principles can be known in two ways. One is by confused knowledge, as when terms are apprehended through the senses and experience, and this suffices for scientific knowledge of the terms in any special science, as in [knowing] that a line has length, while being ignorant of whether its quiddity is substance, quantity or quality, etc. Another way principles can be known is by distinct knowledge, knowing to what category their quiddity pertains, with definitions of terms known distinctly from the evidence of the terms themselves, and this happens through the science of metaphysics through division and composition. And in this way all sciences can be called subordinate, namely to metaphysics. And therefore, given the science of metaphysics, principles of any science whatsoever are known more perfectly than they are suited by nature to be known in that science through its own proper principles. And as a consequence, another science is known more perfectly if one knows metaphysics.

- Scotus, Reportatio I-A, Prol. Q. 2, trans. Wolter and Bychkov

Congratulations

2011-05-30T01:33:00.002-04:00

Congratulations are in order for our occasional contributor Asello Guzman, who in the last week both received his S.T.L. and was ordained a priest of the Holy Catholic Church. He will soon go out into the wide world for a period of pastoral work before his order decides his long-term fate. We hope that he will continue to post here every so often, and more importantly, pray for us and remember us in when he celebrates mass.

Scotus Texts at 'Per caritatem'

2011-05-28T12:09:00.000-04:00

Cynthia Nielsen has scanned some texts of Scotus and posted them on her site. She has posted the critical texts of Ord. III d. 37 (on natural law) and QQ. in Met. IX q. 15 (on the will).

How to Understand Scholastic Thought

2011-05-27T17:19:00.001-04:00

Here are some pointers for beginners wanting to learn about Scholastic theology and philosophy. I hope my fellow bloggers will add their own material to this post.

1. Learn latin (otherwise, you'll be stuck reading Aquinas).

2. Learn the basic elements of Aristotelian logic: quia vs. propter quid demonstrations, parts of a syllogism (middle term, major and minor premises).

3. Read as much Aristotle and Augustine as possible.

4. Know the basic Scholastic genres: Quodlibet, Sententiae, Ordinary questions, Summa, various kinds of commentaries.

5. When you've done all this and are confronted by an actual Scholastic quaestio, consider the following bit of advice I have received from several professors but never followed: start by reading the determination [=the author's own answer/solution] of the question, then read the initial objections and their responses. I have never followed this myself, but it is good advice. Some scholastic questions can be bewilderingly complex (Scotus and Alnwick come to mind) and it is easy to get lost in all the back and forth. In my less lazy moments I like to at least glance over the structure of the question.

6. Read as much as you can by as many authors as you can find. At first the latin will seem weird and opaque if you are classically trained, but the amount of vocabulary is really quite small and the grammar is easier than classical latin. There are no dictionaries of scholastic terms (save for the Aquinas lexicon), so the best way to learn the Scholastic jargon is to read.

Points of Disagreement between Scotists and Thomists

2011-05-27T01:06:00.000-04:00

In 1320 there was a debate between two bachelors of theology at Paris, the Franciscan Francis of Meyronnes and the Cistercian Peter Roger, later Pope Clement V. These two bachelors acted as the representatives of the nascent schools of Thomism and Scotism, and their debate was about the formal distinction and the instants/signa of origin and nature. For those interested in reading more, the dispute has been edited (mostly; at least one ms. was missed) and published by J. Vrin for a reasonable price under the title of Disputatio. The section I translate here is from Francis of Meyronnes list of four points about the formal distinction that were commonly attacked at the time.

Francois de Meyronnes - Pierre Roger, Disputio (1320-1321), ed. J. Barbet, p. 102:

From those statements follow four conclusions in which our school is accustomed to be attacked.

The first is that one must grant some middle distinction between a real distinction and a distinction of reason fabricated by the soul, because that is a medium between some things that is related by the denial of each extreme; that distinction, however, is not posited as being real nor fabricated by the soul.

The second conclusion: that not every distinction outside the soul is real, since those distinctions are posited, with every act of the intellect circumscribed, and nevertheless they are called real. [Perhaps the "those" is a reference to the distinction between essence and relation in God].

The third conclusion: that in one reality can be found many formal rationes, because a formal ratio and a definitive [ratio] are the same and from this part, although there is only one thing [res], there are many formal or definitive rationes.

The fourth conclusion is that formal rationes are able to agree in one distinctly without any composition, because that one [Petrus Rogerius] concedes that a [combination of] likeness with whiteness causes no composition, although they have distinct quidditative rationes.

Gilson on History vs. History of Philosophy

2011-05-26T13:47:00.029-04:00

An interesting comment from Gilson's preface to Owen's The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics, p. vi.

It may seem idle to say that the problem at stake in this book belongs to the history of philosophy, but it is not. To rediscover the thought of Aristotle in its purity is assuredly the work of an historian, using all the resources of modern historical methods, from philology proper to the widest possible critical discussion of the works already devoted to the same subject; but the history of philosophy also requires an historian with the mind of a philosopher, because, in such a case, the very object of history is philosophy, that is, a certain set of philosophical notions to be understood by us in the very same sense which they once had in the mind of a certain philosopher. This is no easy task, but one is sure to miss the point completely if, while availing himself of all the possible sources of historical information, he forgets that the method of methods in the history of philosophy is philosophical reflexion.

Leibniz on the Soul-Body Relation

2011-05-25T13:44:00.001-04:00

The following is a snippet from Leibniz. Note Leibniz here discards a scholastic commonplace held by both Scotus and Aquinas, to wit, that the soul is present in every part of the body. Not a surprising claim, if one knows about hylemorphism, nor one that has any direct bearing on the celebrated controversy regarding the unicity of substantial form.

From Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, 326 (the letters to Clarke):

12. God is not present to things by situation but by essence; his presence is manifest by his immediate operation. The presence of the soul is quite of another nature. To say that it is diffused all over the body is to make it extended and divisible. To say it is, the whole of it, in every part of the body is to make it divisible of itself. To fix it to a point, to diffuse it all over many points, are only abusive expressions, idols of the tribe.

Leibniz's complaint is clear enough. He thinks that the scholastic claim that the soul is in every part of the body amounts to saying that the soul is extended and divisible in itself. What is the A-T or A-S philosopher to say in response? First recall the basic hylemorphic theory: a human being is a composite of matter, generally interpreted as a potential principle, and substantial form, generally interpreted as a principle of actuality. Apart from giving actuality and being to the composite, substantial forms also support accidents. A scholastic philosopher would think of extension and divisibility as accidents, probably falling under the category of quantity. Leibniz wants to argue that since the body is divisible the soul must also, by its very nature, be divisible. But a scholastic would deny this inference, and hold instead that for the soul to be in every part of the body means that, as the subject to the accident of quantity, it is accidentally extended and divisible.

Franciscan and Dominican Inquisitions

2011-05-17T22:31:00.000-04:00

Lest we think all that Dominicans and Franciscans did in the medium aevum was synthesize the true synthesis of faith and reason and destroy it (respectively), here are some hair-raising tales from their activities in the inquisition. From Holly Grieco, "Pastoral Care, Inquisition, and Mendicancy in the Medieval Franciscan Order," in The Origin, Development, and Refinement of Medieval Religious Mendacancies, Brill 2011.

p. 140: Though the historical documentation of Franciscan inquisitions is considerably less plentiful for southeastern France, evidence from one particular inquisitorial trial in Marseille in 1266 suggests that Franciscans successfully established their inquisition there as well. The two Franciscan inqisitors in that city worked tireless in pursuit of heretics evan as they struggled against the conspiratorial plotting of their local Dominican confreres. A number of Dominican friars in the city sought to reclaim the office of heresy inquisition for their own order by accusing one Franciscan inquisitor of treason against the count of Provence. Over a period of several years, the Dominicans developed an elaborate conspiracy against the Franciscan Inquisitor, going so far as to coerce two local priests into bearing false testimony against him. This dramatic tale resulted in the prosecution of the two priests by the second inquisitor involved, and the transfer of three Dominicans to convents in different provinces. Additionally, to limit future tensions and rivalry between the two orders, Pope Clement IV decreed that Franciscan and Dominican inquisitors were forbidden from proceeding against members of the other order.

p. 144: ... in 1302, Pope Boniface VIII found that he could not ignore complaints agasint the Franciscan inquisitors in the Veneto, and he suspended them from the inquisitorial office in that region. As a result, an investigation was launched into the practices of two Franciscan inqisitors, Boninsegna da Trento and Pietrobono Borsemini, who served in the cities and dioceses of Padua and Vicenza. The inquisitors and their confreres faced a number of charges, detailed in the Liber contractuum: extortion, concealment of documents, and acting without the involvement of local bishops. Boniface replaced the Franciscans with Dominicans, who behaved in a similar manner: in 1307-1308, Pope Clement V opened a second investigation into charges made against the Dominican inquisitors.

p. 145: Still, these abuses point to general challenges faced by any individuals who serveda s inquisitors or who had access to the property seized by them, and say little or nothing about the suitability of Franciscans (or Dominicans, for that matter) for the task. It is important to stress that amidst accusations of corruption andp lentiful documentation attesting to abuses, Franciscans did not question the propriety of their involvement in the office. Even at the beginning of the fourteenth century, at a moment of extreme crisis and groing schism, in which competing factionss truggled to define the true nature adn future course of the order, Franciscans continued to serve as inqisitors, and to do so with intengrity.

Jews and Philosophy

2011-05-15T14:10:00.005-04:00

Quotes the Maverick Philosopher:

Leo Strauss sketches an answer in his "How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. T. L. Pangle, University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 221-222, bolding added:

For the Jew and the Moslem, religion is primarily not, as it is for the Christian, a faith formulated in dogmas, but a law, a code of divine origin. Accordingly, the religious science, the sacra doctrina, is not dogmatic theology, theologia revelata, but the science of the law, halaka or fiqh. The science of the law, thus understood has much less in common with philosophy than has dogmatic theology. Hence the status of philosophy is, as a matter of principle, much more precarious in the Islamic-Jewish world than it is in the Christian world. No one could become a competent Christian theologian without having studied at least a substantial part of philosophy; philosophy was an integral part of the officially authorized and even required training. On the other hand, one could become an absolutely competent halakist or faqih without having the slightest knowledge of philosophy. This fundamental difference doubtless explains the possibility of the later complete collapse of philosophical studies in the Islamic world, a collapse which has no parallel in the West in spite of Luther.

Sed Contra, says Roger Bacon:

God has revealed philosophy to His saints to whom also he gave the Law. He did so because philosophy was indispensable for the understanding, the promulgation, the adoption, and the defense of the Law. It was for this reason that it was delivered in all its details in the Hebrew Language ... to the patriarchs and the prophets. They possessed wisdom in its entirety before the infidel sages obtained it. ... All their information about heavenly bodies, about the secrets of nature and the superior sciences, about religions, God, Christianity, the beauties of virtue ... were derived from God's saints. ... Adam, Solomon, and the others testified to the truth of the faith not only in Sacred Scripture, but also in books of philosophy long before there were any philosophers so-called. (Opus Tertium, x and xxiv, trans. S. Hirsch in A. G. Little, Roger Bacon Commemorative Essays [Oxford, 1914], 137).

Scotus on Intensive and Extensive Infinity

2011-05-15T13:17:00.000-04:00

Embedded in a lengthy question on the "action" of the created and uncreated agents with respect to the Eucharist, Scotus examines an interesting objection based on the divine attributes. Basically, the claim is that if the divine will is formally infinite, then it must include very other perfection intrinsic to God, because there can be no addition to infinity, and thus the will, rather than the divine essence, is the infinite sea of substance that John Damascene spoke of and the scholastics so love to cite. Scotus' answer is to distinguish between two kinds of infinity, intensive and extensive. The passage is long enough and probably well enough generally known that I give only a translation.

Duns Scotus, Ordinatio IV d. 13 q. 1 nn. 122-24 (Vat. XII 472-3):

Therefore briefly, it is clear, because God is unqualifiedly blessed in the operations of his intellect and will; for he is not unqualifiedly blessed in his essence as it is infinite, unless he comprehends it; and just as the intellect comprehends by seeing, so the will ... comprehends by loving, for this that it is perfectly blessed. And consequently, each power and each act of each power around the divine essence -- as it perfectly makes itself blessed -- will be infinite.

As proof of that minor [premise] I say that there can be understood in the divine a quasi extensive infinite, as if there would be understood a quasi infinite number of perfections; in another way, an intensive infinite of some unqualified perfection, so that that perfection, according to its own definition [ratio], is without limit and term. And in this second way something can have not only formal infinity, but also fundamental, -- something, however, can have formal intensive [infinity], although not fundamental [infinity].

I say therefore that nothing of one formal definition [ratio] is infinite in the first way, indeed neither perhaps is there such an infinity absolutely in God: for perhaps just as the persons are finite, speaking about that finitude, so also the unqualified perfections are finite in number or in their multitude, and the relations and notions, and this and that are joined together; but formal intensive infinity and fundamental [infinity] are together there in the divine essence as it is essence, and for this reason it is called by the Damascene a 'sea'. Formal [infinity] only, however, not fundamental, is in every other perfection [than the will] unqualifiedly; for each one has its own formal perfection from the infinity of the essence just as from a root and foundation. Neither formal nor fundamental infinity, however, is in the relations, as was shown in Book I distinction 13, because it is better for the Father not to have filiation; 'an unqualified perfection is that which it is better for something to have than not to have'. [cf. Anselm, Mon. c. 15]

The response is then clear, that although the will is formally infinite, nevertheless it does not formally include in itself all intrinsic perfections, because neither the essence nor something other includes them in that way; but neither does it fundamentally include all perfections, but so only the essence [does include them], which is a 'sea'; it includes by identity both whatever unqualified perfection and whatever relation.

Critical Edition of John of Reading

2011-05-13T18:29:00.000-04:00

John of Reading was an English Scotist, who defended the master against Ockham and Auriol. He lectured on the Sentences at Oxford around 1320, and was lector at the Franciscan studium at Avignon until he died in 1346. Francesco Fiorentino has begun a critical edition of his massive commentary, which despite its length doesn't even make it as far as d.8 of book I.

The first volume is available from J. Vrin:

Jean de Reading

Scriptum in primum librum Sententiarum

Vrin, « Textes philosophiques du Moyen-Age ». 384 p., 16 × 24 cm. ISBN : 978-2-7116-2310-5

Ce livre donne un point de vue nouveau sur l’histoire de la pensée au XIVe siècle, grâce aux questions 1 à 5 – jusqu’alors inédites – du Prologue du commentaire de Jean de Reading aux Sentences de Pierre Lombard. L’édition est précédée d’une introduction, qui retrace la vie et les œuvres de Reading, précise la datation, la nature et la structure du commentaire, la liste des questions, les critères d’édition, ainsi que les sources. Elle résume aussi le contenu des questions éditées.
Jean de Reading, théologien franciscain actif à Oxford et à Avignon autour du 1320, est bachelier sous Guillaume d’Alnwick et socius de Guillaume d’Ockham. Il dialogue avec Jean Duns Scot, Guillaume de Nottingham, Robert de Cowton, Richard de Conington, Pierre d’Auriol, Hervé de Nedellec et Durand de Saint-Pourçain.
Dans les questions qui sont ici éditées, Jean de Reading expose sa conception de la méthode en théologie, du sujet et de l’unité d’une science, de la distinction entre sciences. Il participe pleinement, à la hauteur d’Ockham, à l’histoire générale des théories de la méthode scientifique.

Édition, introduction et notes par Francesco Fiorentino

Petrus Thomae on Intrinsic Modes

2011-05-09T22:37:00.000-04:00

This is a follow-up to the post on the pseudo-Francis. Here I will give (in translation) a series of 12 propositions and six corollaries that Peter Thomae gives in his Quaestiones de modis distinctionum. This work was written in the late 1320's at Barcelona, and is devoted to teasing out the meaning of the various kinds of distinctions in use among the scholastics, as well as defending Scotus from the first generation of critics (such as Hervaeus Natalis, Gerardus Boloniensis, and Peter Auriol). Note that I give only the statement of the proposition, not the defense of it. In the last corollary Peter attacks Francis of Mayronis' definition of an intrinsic mode, which was accurately reported by the pseudo-Francis, to wit, an intrinsic mode is that which supervenes on a quiddity without changing its formal definition.

Petrus Thomae, Quaestiones de modis distinctionum, q. 11 a. 1 (cf. Naples, BN, Ms. VIII.F.17, f. 83vb-84ra):

Propositions:

1. An intrinsic mode is in itself in the thing from the nature of the thing (mous intrinsecus est in se in re ex natura rei).

2. An intrinsic mode is not formally a second intention.

3. An intrinsic mode is not formally a quiddity of a thing or part of a quiddity, for if so, therefore every quiddity would be a mode or composed from modes, which is not fitting.

4. An intrinsic mode is not formally a reality, for there is some reality which is not an intrinsic mode, therefore etc.

5. An intrinsic mode is properly in respect to a formality, for a thing is that which it is by means of a formality.

6. An intrinsic mode is not formally a negation, since no negation is intrinsic to something positive; but an intrinsic mode is intrinsic to the thing of which it is the mode; therefore etc.

7. An intrinsic mode is not formally something relative nor something absolute.

8. An intrinsic mode is formally not a grade of intention or remission, because if it were, only that which admits of intension would have an intrinsic mode, which is false.

9. An intrinsic mode is not formally a quantity or magnitude of power as some say.

10. An intrinsic mode does not formally limit something to a certain genus.

11. An intrinsic mode is transcendent [i.e. super-categorical]

12. An intrinsic mode of a thing is a certain positive and transcendent ratio which neither is a quiddity nor part of a quiddity (all these conditions can be elicited from the previous propositions).

Corollaries:

1. An intrinsic mode of a thing has a proper concept.

2. A proper concept of an intrinsic mode is not quidditative but modificative.

3. The ratio of a difference cannot be taken from an intrinsic mode.

4. An intrinsic mode is inseparable in actual existence from the thing of which it is, for it exists things intrinsically, and according to its intimacy [intimitatem], on account of which is impossible that the intrinsic mode be separated from the thing of which it is in actual existence.

5. The statement of the ones saying that an intrinsic mode is that which does not have a precise concept from that of which it is is not true, since indeed it has a proper concept according to which it can be conceived without the thing of which it is a mode being conceived.

6. The statement of those saying that an intrinsic mode is that which supervening on something does not change its formal ratio is not true. For an intrinsic mode is not of the thing of which it is supervening, rather it is prevening, at least by the mode of conceiving, since it has a contracted ratio. Second, because if it did, then that mode would not be intrinsic but accidental, and so there would be an intrinsic mode of that, which is false, etc.

What are Intrinsic Modes?

2011-05-03T19:02:00.000-04:00

Instrinsic modes are another of Duns Scotus' controversial contributions to philosophy, and are perhaps as obscure a feature as one can find in his system. For Scotus these modes operate sort of like differences, in the Porphyrian sense of the term (Porphyry's differences contract a genus into species, Scotus' modes separate different degrees of intensity). I will save further discussion of Scotus' idea of intrinsic modes for a later post. In this post I am giving a handy summary from the pseudo-Franciscus de Mayronis' Tractatus Formalitatum. This treatise has long been known to be by pseudo-Francis; generally, medieval thinkers don't mention themselves by name in their own works, as does this tractate. It is also described as being 'ad mentem Francisci', another clue. This treatise is distinct from the genuine Formalitates of Francis, which appears to be an extract from his Conflatus. Not to give away too much from a certain forthcoming article, but the theory of distinction found in this treatise is not even Francis', who holds to a four-fold division of identity and distinction, but that of Petrus Thomae (seven kinds of identity and corresponding distinction). I have some fantasies ('theories' would imply there was some facts at work) about how this fusion took place, but I'll keep them to myself. Pseudo-Francis' description of an intrinsic mode is that which advenes on a quiddity or forme without altering the definition. He thinks that there are nine kinds of modes, and given what these are, it is clear that multiple modes can befall the same quiddity.

pseudo-Franciscus de Mayronis, Tractatus formalitatum, a.2 (ed. Venezia 1520, f. 263vb):

Quantum ad primum punctum, videlicet quid sit modus intrinsecus, dico talem conclusionem affirmativam: 'modus intrinsecus est ille que adveniens alicui forme seu quidditati non variat eius formalem rationem'. Verbi gratia: signetur albedo, tunc certum est quod aliqius modus competit secundum magis et aliquis secundum minus. Dato quod Sorti competat albedo ut trium graduum, Plato ut quatuor, ibi esset diversa participatio albedinis; non tamen esset variatio in ista ratione formali, quoniam Sortes est vere albus et Plato est vere albus, licet Plato albior sit Sorte.

Hanc etiam conclusionem probo sic: nullum posterius potest variare esse sui prioris; sed modus intrinsecus est posterior eo cuius est modus, scilicet quidditate; igitur modus intrinsecus non potest variare esse sui prioris. Consequentia tenet. Maior nota et minor patet, quia modus est adiecens rei determinatio.

[...]

Quantum ad secundum punctum sciendum quod novem sunt genera modorum intrinsecorum, videlicet finitum et infinitum, actus et potentia, necessarium et contingens, existentia, realitas et hecceitas...

Translation:

As far as the first point is concerned, namely what is an intrinsic mode, I give an affirmative proposition: 'an intrinsic mode is that which supervening on some form or quiddity does not alter the formal definition of that form or quiddity'. For example, let whiteness be designated/signified[?]. Then it is certain that some mode befalls it according to more and some mode which befalls it less. For with it given that whiteness befalls Socrates in the third grade, Plato in the fourth, there would be there diverse participations of whiteness; nevertheless there would not be any variation in its formal definition, since Socrates is truly white, although Plato is whiter than Socrates.

I also prove this conclusion thus: nothing posterior can alter the the being of its prior; but an intrinsic mode is posterior to that of which it is a mode, namely a quiddity; therefore an intrinsic mode is not able to alter the being of its prior. The consequence holds. The major [premise] is known, the minor is clear because a mode is an adjacent determination of a thing.

[...]

According to the second point it should be known that there are nine genera of intrinsic modes, namely finite and infinite, act and potency, necessary and contingent, existence, reality and haecceity.

Aufredus Gonteri on the Modes of Creaturely Being

2011-04-19T12:47:00.000-04:00

The following is a snippet from Gonteri's commentary on the Lombard. Gonteri was a Franciscan from Brittany, and lectured on the Sentences at Barcelona and Paris in the 1320's. His commentary is a good example of the practice of reading the Sentences 'secundum alium', that is copying other scholars' commentaries into one's own. Gonteri takes material from thinkers such as Henry of Harclay, Francis of Marchia, and Gerard Odonis. This is illustrated by the question on modes of creaturely being; see Duba-Friedman-Schabel, "Henry of Harclay and Aufredo Gonteri Brito," in Medieval Comm. on the Sent. of Peter Lombard, p. 304

Gonteri includes (at least) 15 questions from Gerard of Odonis's commentary on Book II. We have edited Odonis's Book II, dist. 1, part 1, qu. 2, which corresponds to Gonteri's Book II, dist. I, qu. 22. Again, Gonteri's choice is impressive, since this question asks "whether before its creation a creature has any being distinct from the being of its cause," and Odonis outlines nine sorts of being that a creature has before creation, in addition to the one being it receives at creation itself. Of the over 300 lines of text in this realist question, Gonteri copies verbatim about 35%, except for transitional statements where he abbreviates, saying for example, et sic de aliis. These ten modes of being are explained in the first 35% of the question, of which Gonteri copies a full 70%. In the second 35% of the question Odonis presents and responds to some objections; Gonteri omits this section entirely. Gonteri then abbreviates heavily in the last 30% of the question, incorporating only about 30% of that section.

Here are the ten modes:

Aufredus Gonteri, Ordinatio/Compilatio super II Sententiarum d. 1 q. 22 (Pamplona, Archivo de la Catedral, Ms. 5, f. 18vb):

Circa solutionem questionis est primo videndum de modis essendi creature ante sui creationem, circa quod sciendum quod creatura habet ante sui creationem 9 modos, et accipit unum per creationem et tunc* sunt X. Primus est esse producibile et potentiale, secundus esse ydeale, tertius esse intelligibile, quartus esse intellectum, quintus esse voluntabile, sextus esse volutum, septimus esse possibile, octavus esse positivum, nonus esse quidditativum, decimus quem per creationem accipit esse positum.

Concerning the solution of the question, first we must treat of the modes of being of a creature before its creation; concerning which it should be known that a creature has nine modes of being before its creation, and it receives one through creation and then there are ten. The first is producible and potential being, the second ideal being, the third intelligible being, the fourth understood being, the fifth willable being, the sixth willed being, the seventh possible being, the eighth positive being, the ninth quidditative being, the tenth which it receives through creation is posited(?) being

Walter Chatton on Divine Ideas and Representation

2011-04-16T17:31:00.000-04:00

These are just notes for myself for an article I'm working on. Enjoy. I think this is inconsistent with holding, as Chatton does, Scotus' Propositio famosa.
Walter Chatton, Reportatio I d. 35 q. 2 (ed. Wey-Etzkorn, vol. 2, 318)

Tertium dubium: quae sit necessitas ponendi, an ad cognoscendum, vel ad producendum, vel ad exemplificandum, vel ad mensurandum? – Dico quod quolibet istorum modorum, modo supra exposito. Nam essentia est ad cuius similitudinem et imitationem res producitur, cognitio autem divina sic est idea quod repraesentat creaturam etc.

Sed nonne essentia divina absolute accepta repraesentat creaturas? – Dico quod sic, quia essentia divina est cognitio divina. Sed si per contradictionem cognitio divina distingueretur ab essentia, cognitio tunc divina repraesentaret omnes res cognoscibiles, et non sic essentia, nisi virtualiter, sicut tunc contineret cognitionem; nam adhuc tunc eo ipso quod esset cognitio perfecta et comprehensiva essentiae, esset infinita, et ita omnis cognoscibilis.

The third doubt: what is the necessity of positing, whether for knowing or producing or for exemplifying or for measuring? I say that in whatever of those ways, in the way explained above. For the essence is to the likeness and imitation of which a thing is produced, divine cognition however is an idea quod represents a creature, etc.

But does not the divine essence understood absolutely represent creatures? I say that it does, because the divine essene is divine cognition. But if by a contradiction [ie. impossibile hypothesis] the divine cognition would be distinguished from the essence, then divine cognition would represent all knowable things, and not so the essence, unless virtually, just as then it would contain cognition; for still by the fact that it would be a perfect and comprehensive cognition of the essence it would be infinite, and so of every knowable thing.

Men Great and Mediocre

2011-04-15T10:43:00.000-04:00

"I wish I could make clear from the very beginning that in criticizing great men, as I shall do, I am very far from forgetting what made them truly great. No man can fall a victim to his own genius unless he has genius; but those who have none are fully justified in refusing to be victimized by the genius of others. Not having made the mathematical discoveries of Descartes and Leibniz, we cannot be tempted to submit all questions to the rules of mathematics; but our very mediocrity should at least help us to avoid such a mistake. There is more than one excuse for being a Descartes, but there is no excuse whatever for being a Cartesian."

—Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York: Scribners, 1937), 7.

Divine Simplicity II: Divine Attributes

2011-04-15T00:39:00.000-04:00

This post covers another aspect of divine simplicity, namely, how it can be reconciled with a plurality of divine attributes. This problem itself is an expression of the more general problem of the relation between divine transcendence and human language. Divine simplicity is one way to ensure that God is unlike everything in the created world, for it is, after all, a negative doctrine: God is not composed, does not have parts, etc.

The scholastics came up with three solutions to the problem. The first was largely semantic. God is so transcendent and ineffable that he cannot be grasped by human thought or captured by human language. Divine attributes, such as wisdom and justice, are all one in God; when these are predicated of God, they signify primarily the divine essence as one. But there is also a secondary sense of these terms, which connotes the created realm as an effect of God. Only in the second sense are they considered distinct. Most of the twelfth-century thinkers held this view, and it was revived by Ockham and Auriol in the fourteenth century.

The second solution was primarily concerned with elaborating the role of the human intellect. Divine attributes are distinct only as a result of the operation of the intellect (that there are divine attributes is generally assumed based on the Dionysian via eminentiae). The intellect is too weak on its own in its present state to directly grasp God, so it requires a plurality of concepts. This plurality of concepts corresponds to the plurality of attributes. This second solution was authored by Bonaventure and Aquinas; or, more accurately, Bonaventure sketched it out and Aquinas developed it more fully. But he could never make up his mind about it, and one of his students that held one of his views was secretly investigated, and in general, Aquinas' changing views caused lots of problems for his would-be followers (such as, what "causes" the attributes, how can the divine essence be the fundamentum in re, is a "ratio" just a concept in the human mind or does it have an objective correlate in God?). So we will omit any further discussion of Aquinas. And in any case, Aquinas is irrelevant for understanding Scotus on this issue.

The relevant thinkers are Henry of Ghent and Godfrey of Fontaines (and, to a lesser extent, Thomas of Sutton). Henry has very complicated views on attributes, and they probably do a lot more work in his system than any other medieval thinker I know. For our purposes here, it suffices to note that Henry had a view regarding the origin of the attributes similar to Scotus' theory of instants of nature (see all the posts labeled "intelligible being"). Henry basically applies the three acts of the intellect from the Aristotelian commentary tradition to God. So we have an instant of simple apprehension in which the divine intellect apprehends the divine essence as one simple thing or one simple nature. But "then" it starts to reason about the essence, and by doing this it generates the attributes (attribute=divine essence+ratio from the intellect). However, and this is important, it does not generate the will, even though it is a sine qua non cause of volitional acts. So in the third instant the will is actualized and begins to go through its own series of movements. In the end we have then two fundamental attributes that cannot be reduced to each other, and all other divine attributes are ordered to one of these primary attributes (incidentally, intellect and will serve as the principles for the emanation of the divine persons, but visit the "Henry of Ghent" blog for more on this).

Godfrey of Fontaines thought all this was bullcrap, and instead extended Aquinas' views on divine ideas to help out the problem of attributes. Basically, ignoring his arguments against Henry, Godfrey thinks that God can compare the divine essence to any creature, and since he is omniscient, and because creatures imitate the divine essence in various ways (hence the multiplicity of perfections that are attributed to God), God can compare his essence to the contents of the human mind and see that the human mind, because of its weakness, sees a plurality of attributes in God. So the distinction of attributes is not really in God at all, just the human mind, but God does know that in a derivative sense he has attributes. So in the end, Godfrey cannot avoid positing some movement in divinis either. [this is not entirely accurate, but I don't want to reread either Godfrey or that chapter of my diss.]

We turn now to Scotus. As is probably well known now to all readers of this blog, Scotus has two commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a Lectura and an Ordinatio, as well as a series of student reports, Reportationes, the most trusty of which seems to be the one labeled I-A. In the first two commentaries, Scotus’ discussion of divine attributes is in d. 8 q. 4 in Reportatio I-A, although the doctrine is the same (save more possible variations regarding the formal distinction), the discussion of it has migrated to d. 45, which is about the divine will. Consequently, I will focus here on the Ordinatio. I do recommend reading the Reportatio, however, for it adds the notion of the propositio famosa, which holds that whatever is distinct in reason can be treated as if it were really distinct; Scotus uses this principle to help him escape from objections to his views based on the identity of indiscernables (as Scotus puts it, if a is the same as c and b is the same as c, then a is the same as b).

The basic point that Scotus argues is that the attributes are distinct prior to or apart from any operation of the intellect, whether the intellect in question is divine, human, or angelic. To start off, in the solution of d.8 q.4 Scotus accepts that there are distinctions of reason in God, as well as distinct formal objects, that is, between different modes of conceiving the same object. This suffices for distinctions between say ‘wise’ and ‘wisdom’, but not between entities like wisdom and truth. This is because God knows the divine essence intuitively (see here for intuitive cognition), and can only find these entities in the essence; he does not cause them by means of his intellect. Here is the argument to this effect:

Ordinatio I d. 8 q. 4 (ed. Vat. IV, 257):

“Praeterea, intellectus intuitivus nullam habet distinctionem in obiecto nisi secundum quod exsistens est, quia sicut non cognoscit aliquod obiectum nisi ut exsistens, ita non cognoscit aliqua distincta formaliter in obiecto nisi ut exsistens est. Cum ergo intellectus divinus non cognoscat essentiam suam nisi intellectione intuitiva, quaecumque distinctio ponatur ibi in obiecto – sive sit distinctiorum obiectorum formalium, sive ut rationum causatarum per actum intellectus – sequitur quod ista distinctio erit in obiecto ut actu exsistens est: et ita si ista est obiectorum formalium distinctorum in obiecto, erunt ista distincta formaliter (et tunc sequitur propositum, quod talis distinctio obiectorum formalium praecedit actum intellectus), si autem sit rationum causatarum per actum intelligendi, ergo intellectus divinus causabit aliquam intellectionem in essentia ‘ut relationem rationis’, ut est exsistens, quod videtur absurdum.”

Translation:
"Furthermore, an intuitive understanding has no distinction in an object except according as it is existing, because just as it does not know some object save as existing, so it does not know something to be formally distinct in the object unless as it is existing. Since therefore the divine intellect does not know its essence except by an intuitive intellection, whatever distinction is posited there in the object – whether it is of distinct formal objects or as definitions caused by the act of the intellect – it follows that that distinction will be in the object as it is existing in act; and so if that is of formally distinct objects in the object, they will be formally distinct (and then the matter at hand follows, that such a distinction of formal objets precedes the act of the intellect), if however it is of definitions caused by the act of understanding, therefore the divine intellect will cause some intellection in the essence, as a relation of reason, as it is existing, which seems absurd."

The result of this is that there is a distinction preceding the operation of an intellect, such that wisdom is in God and goodness is in God, but wisdom in God is not formally goodness in God. Scotus thinks he has an argument that proves this.

Ord. I d. 8 pt. 1 q. 4 n. 192 (ed. Vat. IV, 261)
Quod probatur, quia si infinita sapientia esset formaliter infinita bonitas, et sapientia in communi esset formaliter bonitas in communi. Infinitas enim non destruit formalem rationem illius cui additur, quia in quocumque gradu intelligatur esse aliqua perfectio (qui tamen ‘gradus’ est gradus illius perfectionis), non tollitur formalis ratio illius perfectionis propter istum gradum, et ita si non includit formaliter ‘ut in communi, in communi’, nec ‘ut infinitum, infinitum’.

Translation:
"This is proved: because if infinite wisdom would be formally infinite goodness, then wisdom in common would be formally goodness in common. For infinity does not destroy the formal ratio of that to which it is added, because in whatever grade some perfection is understood to be (which grade, nevertheless, is a grade of that perfection), the formal ratio of that perfection is not taken away because of that grade, so if it [wisdom], as in common, does not formally include [goodness] in common, neither [will wisdom] as infinite [include goodness] as infinite."

This is a pretty compressed argument, and I’m not at all sure what’s going on at the end. This is the clear part:

If infinite wisdom were formally infinite goodness, then wisdom in common would be formally goodness in common.

The likely interpretation of this is that Scotus has in mind his doctrine of ultimate abstraction from Lec./Ord. I d. 5. According to this notion, the mind can perform a series of abstractions from a material object and ultimately arrive at a pure quiddity or definition. With this in mind, the argument means that if wisdom and justice, qua infinite, are the same, then at the level of pure abstraction (that is, with infinity having been abstracted) wisdom and justice must also be the same. Scotus takes this to be false, and the remainder of the quoted passage supports the claim that infinity does not alter the definition of something, in this case, a pure perfection.

Scotus follows this argument with further considerations on what if means to be formally included in the definition of something:

Ordinatio I d. 8 pt. 1 q. 4 (ed. Vat. IV, 261-62)

Hoc declaro, quia ‘includere formaliter’ est includere aliquid in ratione sua essentiali, ita quod si definitio includentis assignaretur, inclusum esset definitio vel pars definitionis; sicut autem definitio bonitatis in communi non habet in se sapientiam, ita nec infinita infinitam: est igitur aliqua non-identitas formalis sapientiae et bonitatis, in quantum earum essent distinctae definitiones, si essent definibiles. Definitio autem non tantum indicat rationem causatum ab intellectu, sed quiditatem rei: est ergo non-identitas formalis ex parte rei, et intelligo sic, quod intellectus componens istam ‘sapientia non est formaliter bonitas’, non causat actu suo collativo veritatem hiuius compositionis, sed in obiecto invenit extrema, ex quorum compositione fit actus verus.

Translation:
I declare this, because ‘to include formally’ is to include something in its essential definition, so that if a definition of the including could be assigned, the included would be a definition or part of a definition; just as the definition of goodness in common does not contain wisdom, so neither [does the definition of] infinite [goodness contain the definition of] infinite [wisdom]. Therefore there is some formal non-identity of wisdom and goodness, insofar as they would have distinct definitions, if they were definable. A definition, however, does not only indicate the notion/definition caused by the intellect, but the quiddity of the thing. Therefore there is formal non-identity form the side of the thing, and I understand this in such a way that the intellect composing that proposition ‘wisdom is not formally goodness’, does not cause the truth of the proposition by its own comparative act, but it finds the extremes in the object, from the composition of which the act is made true."

The basic idea here is that none of the divine attributes include each other in their definitions or parts of definitions, and this is true apart from any operation of the intellect.

So there you have it. The attributes are distinct ex natura rei (which means they are distinct prior to the operation of any intellect, human or divine), a distinction that is formal (the formal distinction is doing most of the work here, so see the relevant post). In God the attributes all exist under the extrinsic mode of infinity, which safeguards divine simplicity (for more on infinity see the ‘natural knowledge of God’ post in this series). When ultimate abstraction is performed, the intellect discovers that these attributes are distinct because none of them fall into the definitions of the others.

The Smithy

Divine Simplicity III: Univocity

Scotus on the Scandal of Philosophy

Review of Brad Gregory's New Book

New Henry edition

Ockham and Scotus and Natural Theology

On Unitive Containment

A Definition of Scholasticism

Hauerwas on Univocity

Marilyn Adams on History of Philosophy

Read the Original - If You Can

more Latin scans online

VIRTUAL LIBRARY: DIGITIZED BOOKS

New Doctor

A Ramble on Ockham, Scholarship, and Other Matters

Scotus' Razor

Robert Prentice and Illuminationism

Brad Gregory's New Book

Ocham on Vallicella and Scotus on Future Contingents

Deep Thoughts from a Neuroscientist

The New Scotist Commission

Gerard of Bologna on Divine Ideas

Richard Rufus of Cornwall

Errantry

Thomas Aquinas on Kinds of Sleep

Truthmakers?

What is a Formality II

Happy Feast of Scotus!

Some Elementary Metaphysics

An Argument for the Distinction of Intellect and Will

Harmonization of Thomas and Scotus on Univocity

The Contingent Will

Christian Philosophy

Swift on Scotus

Argument for the Formal Distinction

Narrative, Philosophy, and the History of Philosophy

Robert Barron on Univocity and Voluntarism

Recent Publications on Petrus Thomae

Recent Posts on Scotus

More on the Duns Scotus Movie

Buridan contra Fundamentalism and Postmodernism

Henry of Ghent on Aquinas and Existence

Self-Identity, Infinite Regress

Grave Poems

Aureola

Notes on Individuation

Scotus on whether Relations Individuate

Edith Stein, Essential Being, and Henry of Ghent

Reflections on the 'Resurrection' of Medieval Philosophy

Popularity

Giraldus Odonis' Marian Miracle

Marenbon on Textual Editions

Duns Scotus Opera Omnia Vol. 13 Now Available!

Scotus on the Soul, Immortality, and Resurrection

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William of Alnwick on Virtual Containment

Pius XII on Luke Wadding

William of Ware Joke

Leibniz on Parsimony

Does Existence have a Quiddity?

Todd Bates

The Franciscan Convent at Avignon

Dionysian Scotism

Leibniz on the Will and Possible Worlds

Leibniz on the History of the Faith-Reason Problem

Cajetan on Scotus

Subordination to Metaphysics

Congratulations

Scotus Texts at 'Per caritatem'

How to Understand Scholastic Thought

Points of Disagreement between Scotists and Thomists

Gilson on History vs. History of Philosophy

Leibniz on the Soul-Body Relation

Franciscan and Dominican Inquisitions

Jews and Philosophy

Scotus on Intensive and Extensive Infinity

Critical Edition of John of Reading

Jean de Reading

Scriptum in primum librum Sententiarum

Petrus Thomae on Intrinsic Modes