Scotus on Intentionality

Intentionality is a Big Deal in contemporary analytic and continental philosophy, and this was also true of medieval. In the following passage Scotus picks out four different senses of the word intention, only one of which is the "directedness" we today associate with the term.

Duns Scotus, Reportatio II d. 13 q. un (ed. Wadding-Vives vol. 23 p.44):

"...tamen hoc nomen intentio aequivocum uno modo dicitur actus voluntatis; secundo, ratio formalis in re, sicut intentio rei, a qua accipitur genus, differt ab intentione, a qua accipitur differentia; terio modo dicitur conceptus; quarto, ratio tendendi in obiectum, sicut similitudo dicitur ratio tendendi in illud cuius est..."

Nevertheless this term 'intention' is equivocal. In one way it is called the act of the will. In the second, the formal ratio in a thing, just as an intention of the thing, from which the genus is taken, differs by intention, from which is taken the difference. In the third way it is called a concept. In the fourth, the means of tending into an object, as a likeness is called a means of tending into that of which it is a likeness.

Duns Scotus on the Universal

The following snippets are from Scotus' QQ. super libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis, Bk. VII q. 18 (opera philosophica IV, p. 348-49, 351). They are of interest to me at the moment because they have an obvious bearing on the issues related to intelligible being; indeed, Petrus Thomae paraphrases the first quotation in his QQ. de esse intelligibli q.1.

"...universale restat videre primo an sit in intellectu. Et distinguo quod dupliciter potest aliquid esse in intellectu obiective, sicut modo loquimur de 'esse in'. Uno modo habitualiter, et alio modo actualiter; sive in actu primo et secundo. Primo modo est ibi quando est ibi ut immediate motivum ad intellectionem, secundo modo quando actualiter intelligitur. Ista esse secundum positionem Avicennae, simul sunt tempore, licet primum prius natura.

...

Ergo cum experiamur quod est aliquis intellectus in nobis quo est universale fieri, hoc est, cui insit aliquid per quod obiectum est praesens ut universale, necesse est aliquid esse activum illius. Et non extra, ut argutum est, ergo intra. Intellectus igitur agens, concurrens cum natura aliquo modo indeterminata ex se, est causa integra factiva obiecti in intellectu possibili secundum esse primum, et hoc secundum completam indeterminationem universalis. Nec est alia causa quare intellectus agens cum natura facit obiectum sic esse nisi quia est talis potentia, sicut nec quare calidum calefacit. Est ergo natura in potentia remota ad determinationem singularitatis et ad indeterminationem universalis; et sicut a producente coniungitur singularitati, ita a re agente et simul ab intellectu agente coniungitur universalitati."

Translation:

...it remains to see whether the univesal is first in the intellect. And I distinguish that something can be in the intellect objectively [ie., is an object of thought] in two ways, just as we speak now of 'being in'. In one way habitually, and in the other actually, whether in first act or second. The first way is there when it is there as immediately moving to intellection, the second way when it is actually understood. Those kinds of being, according to Avicenna, are simultaneous in time, although the first is prior in nature.

...

Therefore when we experience that there is some intellect in us by which the universal is made, that is, something present inside through which the object is present and universal, it is necessary that there be something that activates it. And not from outside, as has been argued, therefore from within. Therefore the agent intellect, concurring with a nature in some way indeterminate of itself, is the complete, "making" cause of the object in the possible intellect according to first being, and this according to the complete indetermination of the universal. Nor is there another cause whereby the agent intellect with a nature makes an object to be so unless because there is such a power/potency, as neither is there a reason why heat heats. The nature is therefore in remote potency to the determination of singularity and to the indetermination of the universal; and as by the producer it is joined to singularity, so from the agency of the thing and with the agent intellect it is joined to universality.

Contradiction in the Trinity?

Dr Vallicella has another post about the Trinity, here:

I don't assert, but I suspect that it's directed at least partially at me. He writes:

5. Is the doctrine thinkable (conceivable) without contradiction? . . . It is difficult to get some people to appreciate the force and importance of (5) because they are dogmatists who accept the Trinity doctrine as true simply because they were brought up to believe it, or because it is something their church teaches. Since they accept it as true, no question of its logical coherence arises for them. And so they think that anyone who questions the doctrine must not understand it. To 'set the objector straight' they then repeat the very verbal formulas the logical coherence of which is in question. "What's the problem? There is one God in three divine Persons!" They think that if they only repeat the formulas often enough, then the objector will 'get it.' But it is they who do not get it, since they do not understand the logical problems to which the doctrinal formulations give rise.

I suspect that this is directed at me, or at least that he thinks I'm one of these people. In his reply to my first letter to him he wrote As you no doubt will grant, the mere repetition of verbal formulas is not the same as an exposition of those formulas that shows them to be intelligible. After my response to his reply he wrote off the discussion as not worthwhile, then writes the above. I infer that he thinks my response was nothing more than a repetition of verbal formulas and that I don't understand the logical problem involved. Now I think that my response indicated no such thing. What I was attempting to do, at least, was to clarify the true sense that the verbal formulas hold, rather than a false and plainly contradictory sense. Now this is indeed different from directly showing that the doctrine is coherent. But, as I've already said, analyzing the doctrine must only come after getting the doctrine right. Now I suggest that the reformulations of the doctrine by Dr Vallicella and his sources distort it through the lens of a metaphysics not designed to accommodate it, so that the "logical problem" takes on the character of a petitio principii. I believe that the very way that Dr Vallicella presents the problem begs the question.

Now Dr Vallicella writes that "the gist of the Trinity doctrine is as follows:"

1. Monotheism: There is exactly one God.

2. Divinity of Persons: The Father is God; the Son is God; the Holy Ghost is God.

3. Distinctness of Persons: The Father is not the Son; and the Holy Ghost is not the Father or the Son.

And he follows this up with:

The problem is to show how these propositions are logically consistent, that is, how they can all be true, but without falling into heresy. If you cannot see the problem, you are not paying attention, or you lack intelligence, or your thought-processes are being distorted by ideological commitments.

So, presumably, Dr Vallicella thinks that responses such as the one I gave are not worth responding since I fall under one or all three of these deficiencies. Well, I wouldn't presume to make claims about my intelligence, and if my thought-processes were being distorted by ideological commitments I may well fail to observe it, but the problem is certainly not that I am not paying attention, since I have been studying Latin Trinitarian theology for many years now.

Now it's not that I "cannot see the problem," since there is a prima facie difficulty. How is God both one and three? How are the three identical with the one but not with each other? But the logic of the solution is not very difficult, hardly more difficult than the formulation of the problem. The key is to properly define the terms and distinguish the kinds of identity involved. But once this is done there is no logical problem at all, because the doctrine does not affirm and deny the same thing and in the same respect:

2. Divinity of Persons: The Father is God; the Son is God; the Holy Ghost is God.

It is orthodox to reformulate this as:

2a. Divinity of Persons: The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are identical with respect to the divine essence.

And now:

3. Distinctness of Persons: The Father is not the Son; and the Holy Ghost is not the Father or the Son.

It is orthodox to reformulate this as:

3a. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are distinct with respect to their personally constitutive relations of origin.

So: The divine persons are identical in one respect and distinct in another respect. This is very different from saying "3=1" or "~(things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to each other)".

As far as I'm concerned this dispenses with, at least, any obvious contradiction. The only way to make the contradiction reappear is by importing some such question-begging premise as the one I quoted in an earlier comment thread by Cartwright, from an article cited with approval by Dr Vallicella:

The heretical conclusion [tritheism] follows, by the general principle that if every A is a B then there cannot be fewer B's than A's.

Cartwright claims that this principle "is evident to the natural light of reason," but the examples he gives are not analogous to the case of the Trinity: "Thus, if every cat is an animal, there cannot be fewer animals than cats; if every senator from Massachusetts is a Democrat, there cannot be fewer Democrats than senators from Massachusetts. Just so, if every Divine Person is a God, there cannot be fewer Gods than Divine Persons." But these examples all presuppose a paradigm of the relation of essence to supposit which is explicitly denied in the doctrine of the Trinity, for reasons explained in my last post. In a quote from St Bonaventure I have already pointed out the difference between humanity in Peter and Paul, for instance, and divinity in the Father and the Son. In the first case Cartwright's principle is correct: If every apostle is a man, then there cannot be fewer men than apostles. But the multiplication of apostles involves necessarily the multiplication of individual instances of humanity. On the other hand since deity is not a common nature like humanity, the multiplication of divine supposits cannot be presumed to involve the multiplication of individual instances of deity. Furthermore it should be clear that the claim is not that "The Father is a God," and "The Son is a God, for this formulation, again, presupposes that "God" is a universal and "divinity" a common nature, a "multiply instantiable entity," which I have already denied.*

One may decide that the way that Catholic theology explains the relation of the essence to the divine persons, and their distinction from one another solely according to their personally constitutive relations of origin, is incoherent or otherwise unsatisfying. But in order to do so one must engage this problem and locate the contradiction somewhere further back than where Dr Vallicella does so.

As it stands Dr Vallicella's attempts to grapple with the Trinity are not as off the mark as Dawkins' flying spaghetti monsters or his absurd attempts to refute arguments to a First Cause by resorting to a childish infinite regress argument. The difference, however, is one of degree, not of kind. If Dr Vallicella's aim really is, as stated, to discover whether the doctrine is thinkable without contradiction, then he must attempt to think it as it is thought, without importing foreign premises.

*There is so little danger of Catholic doctrine falling into tritheism or affirming any multiplication of the divine essence that I would be more sympathetic to an objection claiming that the three persons could not be really distinct at all than to this one claiming that they are too distinct to preserve divine unity. After all the word person does not signify a substance at all, but a relation! And the divine persons are defined as internal relations in the one God. Just look at Aquinas, Summa I q.29 a.4: "Distinctio autem in divinis non fit nisi per relationes originis, ut dictum est supra. Relatio autem in divinis non est sicut accidens inhaerens subiecto, sed est ipsa divina essentia: unde est subsistens, sicut essentia divina subsistit. Sicut ergo deitas est Deus, ita paternitas divina est Deus Pater, qui est persona divina. Persona igitur divina significat relationem ut subistentem. Et hoc est significare relationem per modum substantiae quae est hypostasis subsistens in natura divina; licet subsistens in natura divina non sit aliud quam natura divina. Based on texts like this I could give more credence to an objection that there were not really three at all than to the objection that according to this doctrine God is not really one.

The Formal Distinction, Formalities, and Common Natures

From Scotus' Ordinatio I.Dist.5 P.1 Q.1 paragraph 19. In one mighty sentence Scotus lays out the foundations of the formal distinction and the doctrine of common natures:

In substantiis, quamvis in eadem realiter - etiam quamvis simplici - possint esse perfectiones multae substantiales formaliter distinctae et ibi una formalis ratio possit abstrahi ab alia remanente adhuc concretione utriusque formalitatis ad sua propria supposita (verbi gratia, licet haec sit vera 'substantia intellecta est volitiva' - ubi est praedicatio concretiva perfectionis unius substantialis de alia - tamen haec negatur 'intellectus est voluntas', quia ista significant perfectiones illas ut abstractas a se invicem, et hoc secundum proprias formalitates earum; tamen adhuc ista sic abstraca concernunt propria supposita, quia hic 'intellectus' est intellectus), accipiendo tamen substantiam sive simplicem sive compositam praecise secundum unam rationem formalem quidditativam, tantum est abstractio a supposito propriae naturae communiter, quia non sunt natae concernere aliquid alterius naturae; ideo ista abstractio est maxima.

"In substances, although in the same thing really - however simple they are - there can be many formally distinct substantial perfections, and there one formal ratio can be abstracted from another, the concretion of each formality remaining in its own supposit (for example, although this is true: 'an intellective substance is volitional' - where there is a concretive predication of one substantial perfection about another - nevertheless this is denied: "the intellect is the will', because these [i.e. 'intellect' and 'will'] signify those perfections as abstracted from each other, and that according to their proper formalities; still these things so abstracted concern their own [one and the same] supposit, because this 'intellect' is the intellect [i.e. the intellective faculty belongs to the intellective soul, but the volitive power does too]), nevertheless accepting a substance whether simple or composite precisely according to one formal quidditative ratio, still there is an abstraction from the substance of its proper common nature, because they do not in themselves concern anything of another nature; therefore this abstraction is the greatest."

Notice that in this paragraph he says "formally distinct" while elsewhere in the same question he also says "formal non-identity", leading one to think that there is not much difference between these two formulations.

Don't worry much here about the "greatest abstraction" bit, which is only explained by the succeeding paragraphs. The important point is Scotus' doctrine that two things can be really identical in the sense of absolutely inseparable--like intellect and will in the rational soul, like humanity and Socrateity in Socrates--and yet formally distinct. This means that the two formalities involved do not include one another in their conception or definition, and sometimes means that at least one of the formalities can exist without the other. Socrateity cannot exist without humanity, since it cannot be the case the Socrates is not human, but humanity can exist without Socrateity, since there can be (and are) many men that are not Socrates. Humanity in itself does not concern itself in anything belonging to another formality, so that it is indifferent to Socrateity or Platonity. And similarly, there can be no men which are not animals, but animality itself is indifferent to humanity and equinity, so that the formal ratio--the intelligible structure, as we might want to say--of animality is formally distinct from any specific difference, though in a concrete supposit it never exists without being determined by some such specific formality. (As a universal in the mind, however, it does.)

Theoremata Scoti, Pars I

The first part of Scotus' infamous Theoremata is concerned with the universal, and its relation to the singular existent on the one hand and the intellect on the other hand. There are six main propositions, with explanations and--as always with Scotus--some rabbit trails. This preliminary study will be English-only, since I don't feel like typing in the Latin (hey, if you want real scholarship, read a print journal!), but for the record I'm using as my text Vol. II of Scotus' Opera Philosophica.

I. The intelligible precedes intellection by nature.

"Which is because reception [passio] presupposes an agent and every action is about something." If we are to understand something there must be something to understand. The intellect does not create all of its own intelligible content, any more than the sense power creates the objects of the senses: sight presupposes the visible object as well as light and a working eye. Unlike sight, of course, the intellect can create some of its intelligible content.

II. It is impossible for the first intelligible to be caused by intellection.

"Which is from comparing intellection and the intelligible to the same intellect." Even if the intellect received no information from outside itself it would still have to understand something other than its own concepts: no intellect could know nothing but logic. The intellect itself is an intelligible object before it understands or is understood.

III. We understand the universal first.

Scotus spends a lot of time arguing this point. Unlike, say, Thomas, Scotus admits that the singular is intelligible per se, since for him singularity is a formal property, not some material detritus. Why then is the singular not the first intelligible object? After all, it is the singular thing which acts, not its abstracted universal nature, and so the singular should be the first thing to act on the intellect. Scotus reminds us, however, that there is for us no science of the singular, that the intellect forms a universal by separating the intelligible nature from the leftover singularity. "It is true [that it is the singular which acts], but not insofar as it is singular. For the nature is the ratio of acting." Just as in natural generation the species is multiplied, but not the individual, so in cognition the singular gives rise to an intelligible universal, not a proper concept of the singular.

Our lack of knowledge about the singular per se is neither because we fail to actualize our capacity for it, nor because the singular is unintelligible per se, but because our intellect is too imperfect to achieve it. Just as an intrinsically visible object might not be seen by feeble eyes in weak candlelight, the light of our intellect is strong enough to illumine the nature but not the singularity. Our knowledge then is always imperfect. "For although in a precise comparison the nature is a more perfect knowable than the singularity, nevertheless the cognition of a singular nature is more perfect than that of the nature alone, because it is more distinct."

Scotus goes on to discuss possible reasons for this weakness of the intellect at some length, with more comparisons to the sense powers.

IV. To any universal there corresponds in reality [in re] some grade of entity, in which the things contained under the universal itself coincide.

Scotus says this should be clear from I. and II. For if the universal is not created by the intellect then it must have something corresponding to it in reality. This correspondence is not fictional, but real, or else there could be no true quidditative predication and metaphysics would not differ from logic.

V. In essential predication it is impossible to go to infinity.

Otherwise nothing would be knowable, since we can't pass through an infinite series, nor can our finite intellect apprehend an infinite series all at once. Definition has a limit, and we can really know what something is, even if only confusedly.

VI. It is simply impossible for the first and most universal to be plural.

There cannot be a plurality of first and most universal concepts or grades of entity. In analyzing we always proceed to the simpler concept, and therefore eventually to the first and simplest. And as in any order it is impossible to find two firsts, it is even more so in the highest order, to which multitude is more repugnant.

To conclude:

I. The universal, although produced by the agent intellect, is strictly speaking not caused by it, because something in reality corresponds to it. II. That universal, insofar as it has being in something or with something singular, we first understand as a kind of primary whole object, although the intellect from its imperfection can per se understand the nature as a quasi-part of the primary whole object, and can distinguish this from that [i.e., can distinguish the nature as such from the whole object], while not conceiving the other part, namely the singularity.--For which intellection the action of the agent intellect is required. Whence any part of the first whole object can be first for the intellect, and afterwards the intellect can per se distinguish it from another. Whence a child first distinguishes his father from non-man, then from non-father.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

As conceptualized, existence manifests itself as absolutely necessary for the constitution of the thing. As originally grasped through judgment, it shows itself to be accidental to the thing. Existence is that way. It has both aspects, and allows itself to be known under both. If either aspect is neglected or excluded, a one-sided picture arises. If the specific role of judgment is not understood, the contingent side of existence is disregarded as irrelevant to philosophy, for instance in Aristotle and Duns Scotus. If the universalizing and necessitating function of conceptualization is set aside in the case of existence, the extreme individualism and antinomian vagaries of recent existentialist movements result. Existence, as actually found in things, is both highly individual and necessarily specified by a universalizing nature that it actuates. For a balanced estimate, neither viewpoint, neither cognitional approach, can afford to be neglected.

--Joseph Owens, An Interpretation of Existence, 62.

Scotistic Abstractions

Here's a quote I've been meaning to post for a while, on different kinds of abstractions. The most interesting bit here is probably that of "ultimate abstraction," which we encountered a year or so ago when I posted that bit on Petrus Thomae from his Quaestio de distinctione praedicamentorum. So here it is: Reportatio IA d.5 pt. I q.1 n.16-20 [ed. and tran. Wolter 264]

"I say that abstractions are multiple; for one is the abstraction of an accident from its subject, another is the abstraction of the quiddit from a supposit.

Also, abstraction is from every thing of another kind[generis].

Also in relatives there is a double abstraction, that of an accident from its subject, and secondly of a relation from its foundation.

But then the ultimate abstraction is when a formal reason is considered precisely according to itself without anything else which is not included per se in its formal notion, as humanity is only humanity itself.

Proof: an adjective is never predicated as identical[with its subject], or never can it be predicated by an identical predication, because the way an adjective signifies is as 'informing', 'added to', and 'denominating' a nature or noun. Therefore if a predicate is predicated identically and not formally, it is predicated in a manner opposed to the very way it conceptualizes, and therefore it follows that such a proposition is false, because subject and predicate are taken under opposed conceptions. But that is not the case here when it is said: 'God is generating,' because 'God' is not taken in the sense of its ultimate abstraction, and therefore something is predicated of it that is not included in its per se formal notion."

On a related note, in his quodlibetal discussion in which he attacks Scotus' formal distinction, Hervaeus Natalis takes this notion of ultimate abstraction to be purely mind dependent. I think he misses the point, which is not spelled out here in this passage, that this ultimate abstraction is singling out a common nature; while the act of singling out is indeed an act of reason, the nature itself exists as such with less than numerical unity independent of the mind.