Interesting Thoughts around the 'NET

There have been a number of interesting posts today, or at least I first noticed them today.

First is Robert Pasnau, with some reflections on how to form a canon of medieval philosophy. He points out that there isn't a narrative for the period 500-1500 like there is for other periods in the history of philosophy. He does not mention the narrative that arose simultaneously with the modern study of medieval philosophy, that is the Thomist one.

Pasnau links to Martin Lenz, who points out that such narratives have ideological origins and uses, and change when the dominating ideologies change.

Finally, Derrick Peterson posted a paper on his blog about "deleting theology", the narratives surrounding secularism. He provides a fascinating quote from Ian Hunter the gist of which is that the various accounts from religious thinkers or anti-religious ones are not themselves historical accounts or based on empirical histories, but are rather ideologies. Now while I may be sympathetic to this, I can't help but wonder if something like "empirical history" is itself free of "cultural-political agendas", as if there is some historical viewpoint that is free from theological or philosophical conditioning.

In any case, there are many interesting thoughts to be had today.

The Ratio Algazaelitica

Scotus' argument from certain and doubtful concepts (see this post for explanation) was been given a variety of descriptions during the Middle Ages. Francis de Mayronis calls the major premise at least "Scotus' rule", Peter Thomae describes the whole thing as the "ratio famosa," and one can also find marginalia indicating that it is Scotus' "Achilles argument" in Peter of Aquila's Sentences Commentary. By Achilles, presumably, is meant that it is the strongest weapon in Scotus' arsenal, not that it is his fatal weakness. 

In the fifteenth century, the French Franciscan and (eclectic?) Scotist William of Varouillon made some interesting remarks on the argument, which have been noted a few times in modern literature, though I don't think they have been quoted. After quoting the argument, William lodges the following objection against it:

Sent. I d. 3 q. 1 a. 2 (Venezia 1502, f. 10vb): Huic fortissime rationi aliqui dicunt quod est regula Scoti et quod transeat cum regula sua.

Quibus ego respondeo quod si non curant de Scoto, vadant ad Metaphysicam Algazaelis, qui maximus reputatus est metaphysicus, et istam regulam quasi iisdem verbis reperient. Unde regula ista, si ab inventore nominetur, dicitur non Scotica sed Algazaelitica nuncupatur. 

Translation:

Some say to this strongest argument that it is the rule of Scotus and that he passed away with his rule.

To which I say that if they don't care about Scotus, let them go to the Metaphysics of al-Ghazali, who is deemed the greatest metaphysician, and they will find that rule almost with the same words. Whence that rule, if it should be named by its discoverer, should be called not Scotic but Algazalitic.

The object is that Scotus came up with the rule, and since he is dead, it is no longer valid. The rule here probably being the major premise, though the whole thing is loosely in al-Ghazali. William's reply locates a deeper lineage to the argument than simply Scotus. In some of the modern literature the algazalian origin is discounted in favor of Avicennian, but in truth it is in both.

Scotus the Spinozist

Here is an interesting historical tidbit that I don't believe I have posted on: the Kleutgen-Stockl model of medieval philosophy. They were mid-19th century Jesuits who developed the model of medieval philosophy that we all know and love today: all previous human philosophical endeavours lead up to the pinnacle of Aquinas, who was immediately followed by a catastrophic decline into filthy Scotism, Ockhamism, modernism, protestantism and so on. You can read all about it in John Inglis, Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy (Brill 1998). Here I post Inglis' summary of Kleutgen's judgement of Scotus.

Inglis, p. 97

Duns Scotus and his followers are termed "formalists" by Kleutgen because they fail to appreciate that physical things are more than mere forms. Kleutgen argues that since, for Scotus, the individualizing principle of any particular thing is yet another form, he does away with actual individual subjects, and in doing so abolishes the philosophical foundation that is necessary in order to distinguish between individuals. What we have in Scotus is, according to Kleutgen, an endless number of predicates with no subject to which they could adhere. Since the Scotists offer a view of forms without subjects, they must conclude that the entire world is a single subject. Even though Scotus and his followers do not claim to be pantheists, the logic of their view leads inevitably to the conclusion that all is one.

So one begins to understand why at the dawn of the 20th century, Scotists such as Parthenius Minges were compelled to write articles defending Scotus from the pantheist charge. Luckily he was successful in this, even if the general model of decline and fall remains.

More on Postmodernism

A great example of the "narrative" of Scotus' ruination of the world:

Joseph M. de Torre,  "Thomism and Postmodernism", in Postmodernism and Christian Philosophy, 248.

From the nominalism and voluntarism of William of Ockham (1300-1350), already adumbrated by the formalism of Duns Scotus (1266-1308), to the skepticism of Montaigne (1533-1592) and Francisco Sanchez (1522-1623), there was a logical development, aided by the so-called religious wars occasioned by Protestantism and, in the previous century, by the Hussite revolt in Bohemia as well as the lingering conflict with the Moslem Turks. The attention of philosophers was diverted to politics, economics and experimental sciences with the consequent weakening in metaphysical insights.

No footnotes or proof of any kind is offered. It is a rather hysterical tirade about how all Thomists before the 20th century were infected with Scotus' "formalism" and "essentialism" and how we must all return to the actus essendi to redeem the world. Oh well, what do you expect from a conference paper delivered at the top-secret invitation-only Maritain conferences at Notre Dame? I only post this as the best summary of the narrative of the decline of philosophy that began the instant someone first criticized Thomas Aquinas.

Ockham the Scotist? Part II

The following excerpts are taken from Rega Wood's translation and commentary Ockham on the Virtues, in the second chapter of her Introduction. I offer a few comments in bold.

As an Oxford theologian, Ockham was preoccupied with the works of Scotus. Few of Ockham's important philosophical or theological doctrines can be fully understood without reference to Scotus's views. [In this respect the relationship between Ockham and Scotus is reminiscent of that between Scotus and Henry of Ghent. Scotus serves as the default starting point for Ockham as Henry does for Scotus. This of course doesn't imply in the least that Ockham is just a heterodox Scotist, any more than Scotus is just some kind of Henrician. What it implies is that, for most of the great medieval thinkers, reading widely is essential for grasping the author at hand. One can read much of Descartes or Hume or Husserl in relative isolation and grasp at least a great deal of their thought. But if one picks a given medieval philosopher to read in isolation one is overwhelmingly likely to misunderstand or fail to grasp a great deal of what is being said. Most works of medieval philosophy and theology are not self-standing treatises but entries in a vast discussion and debate. Even though the debater usually tries fairly to sum up his opponents' points, we really need to listen to the other participants to properly follow it. This is true even for Aquinas and his readers often unfortunately fail to notice it. However it's less true for Aquinas than for most other thinkers of the time. Aquinas doesn't use, say, Albert as his default starting point in the way mentioned here, and the monumental character of his his greatest works can produce the illusion of independence from his context.] But Ockham's citation practice serves to conceal the extent of the influence. Ockham often borrows the basic elements of Scotus' view tacitly, naming Scotus only in connection with disagreements, even when the point in dispute is minor. Most notably, Ockham disagrees with Scotus on the problem of universals: Ockham denies the existence of common natures and attacks realism. But even when he disagrees with Scotus, his respect is evident; for example, when treating universals, he takes care to distinguish misinterpretations of Scotus from the views themselves, which he quotes extensively. Once, when criticizing Scotus, Ockham remarks that Scotus probably would not have disagreed, given his great knowledge of logic. [This almost seems to obscure the importance of the rift on universals, which permeates the two philosophies and their differences in tone and emphasis as well as substantive content to a degree impossible to overstate.]

But respectful as he was, Ockham shows no special reverence in citing Scotus; he normally refers simply to John or Brother John, in De connexione virtutum and in his early Reportatio commentary on the Sentences. Subsequently Ockham does refer to Scotus as the Subtle Doctor, adding that he is so called because he exceeds others in the subtlety of judgment, but noting that Scotus is not an authority for him in the same way as he is to his followers. Ockham does not mince words when he thinks Scotus is mistaken.

Ockham's manner of reference contrasts with that of Adam Wodeham, his student, in about 1330, who refers to Scotus as "Our Doctor," - that is, the Franciscan Order's doctor. Ockham did theology precisely in the period when Franciscans first began to venerate Scotus. Ockham's less deferential approach to Scotus may explain in part the hostility with which he was regarded by such fellow Franciscans as John Reading and Walter Chatton. The dispute between Ockham and Scotus's defenders was as much a matter of attitude as of doctrine, and it has served to obscure both the extent of Ockham's debt to Scotus and the degree to which Ockham influenced Scotists, such as Reading and Chatton. [It's hard for me not to read into this some connection with Ockham's attitude, his lack of reverence and quickness to label disagreement heresy, towards the Pope. I rather suspect that when people try to trace the Reformation back to Ockham the similarity they find between himself and the Reformers is more one of personality and attitude than in the real content of his thought. Aquinas and Scotus were both saints; Ockham was not.]

If Ockham's criticisms of Scotus were a product of intimate familiarity, his knowledge of Aquinas was much more limited. Indeed, instead of discussing Aquinas, when contending against views associated today with Aquinas, he often has other medieval authors in mind . . . [Wood mentions Giles of Rome, Richard of Middleton, and Peter of Spain here. It should go without saying that this same point applies when reading many authors of the time.]

Studies showing that a superficial reading of Ockham understates his debt to Scotus should not be taken as evidence of a lack of originality. They are a sign rather that we cannot understand Ockham without knowing Scotus. In the end, a "strong reaction" may be as important a manner of developing a philosophy as there is.

It's a good idea to read Ockham even if you think his philosophy is fundamentally flawed, as I do. First, because one can't read much of him without realizing very clearly that he was a great genius, greater than many more-studied moderns. He may be wrong, but he's smart. If Scotus' defining quality is his subtlety, and it surely is, the overwhelming impression given by reading Ockham is that he is sharp, extremely, penetratingly, keenly sharp. He cuts through all the intellectual morass and puts his scalpel right into the heart of the problem in play.

Second, because although he is most famous for his razor Ockham makes an excellent whetstone. My doktorvater T.B. Noone (from whom I also took courses in Bonaventure, Scotus, and Ockham), has said in my hearing many times that you can't know if you're really a Scotist without studying Ockham extensively. In a sense you have no right to cleave to a position before having confronted its most trenchant critique; in a similar way any metaphysician ought to seriously confront Nietzsche. In my opinion Scotus makes the most powerful case for realism and Ockham gives the best counterpoint. As a kind of mirror-image inversion of Scotism Ockham is extremely useful for the Scotist, but the Thomist would do well to consider him too. Most Thomists typically read few other scholastics and see Thomas as superior to all competitors, but for them those competitors are usually the ancients and the moderns. Of course I think that Thomists should read Scotus, but for expansion and correction, rather than sheer contrast. Ockham provides a real alternative philosophy that inhabits the same intellectual world as Thomas, with the same habits of argument and the same authorities, but with grossly different arguments and conclusions. Coming to grips with those arguments, rather than merely rejecting the conclusions, will make a better Thomist (even if dealing with Ockham will make you more likely to depart from the letter of the Summa, which is not suited to handle all objections).

Third, Ockham may be helpful simply in understanding Scotus, in a different way than the helpfulness of modern scholarship. Scotus is subtle; he's also disorganized and a poor writer; reading him is harder even than the intrinsic difficulty of his thought requires. Ockham, by contrast, is limpid and straightforward, and seeing how he approaches a Scotistic problem can clarify for us exactly what Scotus himself is up to (reading later Scotists can have the same salutary effect), even when his critiques and his own solutions turn out to be too neat and oversimplified to match reality. Along these lines, reading Ockham is just more enjoyable than reading Scotus (and many other scholastics), at least in certain moods when one is not inclined to relish the feeling of being lost in the woods.

Yet Another Review of Brad Gregory

Here. This one is devestating.  Some snippets.

BUT IF YOU DON'T buy that story, Gregory has another. This one, which has little to do with the Reformation, focuses on transformations in medieval theology and early modern philosophy. This is not his specialty (nor mine), which is perhaps why the writing here is clotted and the thoughts seem second-hand; positions are stated rather than argued, and without regard to well-known objections and rebuttals. Essentially the issues come down to the old quarrel between affirmative theology and negative theology—very roughly, over whether we can speak meaningfully of the attributes of God, or whether He is the He of whom nothing can be said. As Gregory rightly insists, how one thinks about this question affects how one thinks about nearly everything else. That is what makes the history of medieval Christian theology and philosophy so fascinating to study: every possible permutation of every possible argument about every possible subject is to be found there. The more one encounters it in all its variety, the more derivative subsequent philosophy seems.

Medieval Christian thought was hyper-plural—which is why Thomas Aquinas hoped that his Summa Theologiae would resolve its fundamental antinomies and make order out of chaos. Brad Gregory, though, is committed to the view that before the Reformation the harmony of the heavens was mirrored in Christian life and thought. And so he makes the bald assertion (argument would be too strong a word) that before the late-medieval writings of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, something called “traditional Christian metaphysics” held sway, and leaned in a somewhat negative theological direction. According to “traditional Christian teaching,” he writes, “God is literally unimaginable and incomprehensible.” It is hard to know what he means by “traditional” here, given the centuries of disagreement about just what it means to say that God is, or acts providentially, or performs miracles, or was incarnated, or can be understood, or is present in the Holy Eucharist. Or how such a metaphysics manifested itself at the popular level, where ordinary clergy and common believers thought of God as the Big Bearded Being, took miracles to be the direct work of His hands, venerated the saints and their sacred relics, practiced magic, and swallowed the host whole, lest their teeth add wounds to the flesh of Christ.

Modern Thomists have long asserted that the departures from the Summa by Scotus and then Ockham unintentionally paved the way for modern philosophy and science. The (simplified) argument goes like this: Scotus compromised God’s transcendence by claiming that a single concept of being applies both to Him and to His creation, whereas Thomas had said that only an analogy could be established between them. Once God and creation were thought to inhabit the same mountain, so to speak, the question arose how far up the slope one needed to go to explain things farther down. The answer of modern science would be: not very far. God is a hypothesis that we can, for practical purposes, do without. For Thomists such as Étienne Gilson, the decoupling of modern science from theology, and subsequently from morality, was foreordained by these two subtle theological departures from the grand Summa.

Gregory, though, is not interested in defending Thomism—or even theology, which he appears to distrust, believing perhaps that it is incapable of proving what he wants it to prove. So like many American theoconservatives, he makes a populist turn. He is annoyed not only that “religion is not and cannot be considered a potential source of knowledge,” just “a matter of subjective opinion and personal preference,” but also by the contemporary secular assumption that “knowledge must be based on evidence, it must make sense” and that it “must be universal and objective: if something is known or knowable, its content is not contingent on who discovers it.” He wants to defend other “ways” of knowing, which he calls “salvific participatory” and “experiential,” along with “a sacramental view of reality.”

At this point a narcotic haze descends on the book. Gregory wants us to believe that medieval Christendom before the theological fall seamlessly harmonized distinct “kinds” of knowledge, blending theology, natural science, and “individually differentiated participatory knowledge of the faith and its shared way of life, based ultimately and above all on God’s actions in Jesus.” And what was the nature and content of that knowledge, exactly? Gregory never explains. Perhaps by its very nature it cannot be communicated verbally. The most we are told about Christian life in the old days is that “the better that one lived it—the holier one was—the clearer did [God’s] truth become, a sapientia beyond mere scientia. The lived holy wisdom of the saints, quite apart from whether they were erudite or brilliant, embodied most conspicuously this sort of knowledge.” I leave the reader to make sense of those words. The meaning of the following sentence, though, is perfectly clear: in medieval Christianity, “the pursuit of knowledge for some other end, or as an end in itself, was literally vain in the sense of purposeless.”

Faith seeking understanding, with a curfew at eleven—that’s Gregory’s historical, and apparently future, ideal. So what happened? Well, late scholasticism, which pursued its dialectical games late into the night, mindless of the lived faith of others, shares part of the blame. Then, of course, the Bible was “let loose among the ‘common man’” by the Reformation. After that, states and universities became divided by confession, knowledge became a tool of state power, scripture was subjected to the higher criticism, and disciplines became separated from each other. In Europe, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s modern research university distanced itself from religious questions and affiliations, and in the United States religious colleges governed by milquetoast liberal Protestants eventually succumbed to this German virus, giving birth to our centerless multiversity, which spawned today’s anti-rational, anything-goes postmodernism.

And that’s how we got from scholasticism to structuralism.

Duns Scotus and the Brockie Forgeries

What follows are some brief thoughts on the volume I linked to earlier, Blessed John Duns Scotus: Marian Doctor by Fr. Stefano Manelli, FI. It is published by the Franciscans of the Immaculate, who also have several other volumes on Scotus for sale. Let me say at the outset that I am more than pleased that they are attempting a popular presentation of Scotus. Given the current position held by Catholic Academia (Scotus is evil), it is encouraging that there are those who promote his thought.

Unfortunately this volume relies on the Brockie forgeries. Which is odd, because these were exploded over fifty years ago.  More on Brockie below. The information that comes from the forgeries is that Scotus had an uncle named Elias, his father was named Ninian and was a wealthy landowner. These facts are also found in just about every internet  biography of Scotus, as I am reminded every Nov. 8 when all the 'saint of the day' blogs post this erroneous info. It was also present in the Duns Scotus movie, which was produced by the same Franciscan group.  The Manelli volume also includes lots of other pious myths, but unfortunately he gives no references so I cannot trace them down. Normally, the lack of notes in a volume meant for popular consumption would not bother me, but given there is so much myth-making involved I would like to know where it comes from. For example, the author claims Scotus was a big dummy but prayed to the Virgin who made him smart (this was also in the movie). Also, Scotus allegedly held the Christ child on one Christmas eve during 1290's. Also, before his famous debate at Paris over the immaculate conception, he passed a statue of the Virgin on the facade of the royal chapel and asked the Virgin's favor. The statue nodded, and henceforth was known as "Our Lady of Duns Scotus", but was broken up and thrown in the Seine by the French revolutionaries, and was eventually dredged up by another order and became known as 'Our Lady of Good Health'. Finally, Scotus is alleged to have suffered a breakdown in disputing with Beguines and Beghards and died soon after (perhaps a none too subtle attempt to make him a martyr and so an automatic saint). All of these tales are alleged but no reference provided. No doubt they are part of Scotus' hagiographical tradition and not simply fabricated by Fr. Manelli, but in the absence of notes it's impossible to tell.

But regarding the Brockie forgeries about Scotus' origin there is no excuse, as a lengthy article was published in the first Studia Scholastica-Scotistica series.

Henry Docherty, "The Brockie Mss. and Duns Scotus" in De Doctrina Ioannis Duns Scoti, Rome 1968, 327-360.

Marianus Brockie (1687-1755) was a Benedictine of the abbey of St. James in Regensburg, Bavaria. He attempted to write a history of the religious orders called the Monasticon Scoticanum, though it was never published. This volume was examined early in the twentieth century by a historian, Dr. Easson, and Longpre, the famous Scotus scholar. Easson was suspicious of some of it, but it was not until Docherty wrote his article that the true extent of the fabrications became clear.

Here's a choice quote from Docherty's article, a comment on a passage about "Elias Duns", p. 357:

In other words, in his anxiety to substantiate his unique thesis on the origin and early life of Duns Scotus, Brockie actually introduces the allegedly relevant clause from the Tweedie Codex and Register [both fabricated] in no less than three different original versions, all variously corrected and two duly cancelled, and with the bold emphasis of its having been found "his verbis", "nominatum" and "expressis verbis". This is surely the high-water-mark of Marianus Brockie's catalogue of bogus charters, fictitious histories, imaginative hagiography, outright mendacity and crass effrontery. On his testimony alone has rested the popular Maxton-Littledean theory on the birthplace of John Duns Scotus, and not the least contribution to the seventh centenary of that event would be its timely and final erasure from the standard manuals and other works of reference: to that end this study has been directed.

on p. 358 he summarizes his results:

1. Marianus Brockie was himself guilty of forgery in compiling his Monasticon Scoticanum

2. This was by no means an isolated instance or occasional lapse; rather, it permeates the whole of his Dominican history and almost constitutes entirely that of the Friars Minor Conventual.

3. The so-called "Codex Tueedianus" - in so far as he intended its acceptance as a primary source - simply did not exist, except in his own incredible imagination.

4. Quite clearly the alleged Register of the Franciscan Conventuals at Haddington comes into the same category.

5. So also - I venture - does the elusive William Tweedie, "scriba primarius" of Haddington, not to mention Elias Duns and the other kindred of John Duns Scotus.

6. The total number of documents which I have found to be certainly fabricated by Brockie in respect of the Scottish Dominicans and Friars Minor Conventual is at least sixty-five, plus three probables, i.e. where the holograph copy is missing. From the nature of these we can also evaluate his references to ohers, including alleged diplomas of Alexander III, David II and James I, which "had been eaten-away by book-worm". Nor does the list include his countless "extracts" on personalities and other items, apparently taken from the codices containing the documents. Of the latter forgeries, six royal diplomas, twenty-seven other charters and one indenture from the Tweedie Codex refer to the Franciscans, while twelve others (including one probable) from the same source apply to the Dominicans. No less Brockie's own composition, although falsely ascribed to other sources such as Guthrie and the Baillies of Castelcary, are three royal diplomas and sixteen charters, plus two probables, for the Friars Preachers also.

Ironically, Manelli includes the letter of Paul VI, "alma parens", which was written for the conference in which Docherty's article appears.

Manelli also includes an address of John Paul II to the Roman Scotistic Commission; JPII is more positive in his assessment than is the current Pope. See Manelli, p. 112:

With his splendid doctrine on the primacy of Christ, on the Immaculate Conception, on the primary value of the Revelation and of the Magisterium of the Church, on the authority of the Pope, on the capability of human reason to make the great truths of faith accessible, at least in part, and to show their non-contradictory nature, Duns Scotus is even today a pillar of Catholic theology, and original teacher, full of ideas and incentives for an ever more complete knowledge of the truth of the faith.

Final estimation of Manelli's book: most of it is pious myth, the section on Scotus' positive doctrine is short (and seeks include Scotus as a defender of the title 'co-redemptrix' for Mary), but the translation of 'Alma parens' and JPII's address is well worth the price ($4.25).

Buried Alive!

I found another piece of information about the story of Scotus being buried alive.  This is from Ioannes Bremer, one of the 15th. c. Franciscan Scotist theologians who taught at Erfurt. The following quote is from his Sentences commentary, composed ca. 1429. So that's a little over a hundred years after Scotus' death (for background on this myth see one of my earliest posts).

L. Maier, "Der Sentenzenkommentar des Johannes Bremer," Franz. Stud.  15 (1928), p. 168:

Item, Augustinus anagogiam docet, quid appetendum sit. Et concordat cum eo evangelista Johannes, qui cognoscitur ut aquila, quia de altissimis et intimissimis Dei scribit et volando perspexit, videlicet in capitulo suo primo: In principio erat verbum. Quem subtiliter invehitur doctor subtilis, frater minor Johannes Scotus de Duns, qui multa arcana speculatus, videlicet sua multa et magna opera, sive copia librorum. Qui multoties raptus est, in Spiritu theologiam perscrutando, et ita speculando subtilia Coloniae semivivus id est sic raptus sepultus est. Cuius anima indubie requiescat in pace.

Leibniz on Scotus and Aquinas

The following quotation is from Leibniz's Theodicy.  It is a section in which Leibniz discusses the idea of equipoise in the will, the Buridan's ass scenario in which the ass is confronted by two equally enticing piles of hay on each side of the road and is unable to choose between them.  Eventually, the Molinist controversy comes up, the immediate context of what follows.

Leibniz, Theodicy, tr. Huggard, p 324.

330. If the Scotists and the Molinists appear to favour vague indifference (appear, I say, for I doubt whether they do so in reality, once they have learnt to know it), the Thomists and the disciples of Augustine are for predetermination. For one must have either the one or the other. Thomas Aquinas is a writer who is accustomed to reason on sound principles, and the subtle Scotus, seeking to contradict him, often obscures matters instead of throwing light upon them. The Thomists as a general rule follow their master, and do not admit that the soul makes its resolve without the existence of some predetermination which contributes thereto. But the predetermination of the new Thomists is not perhaps exactly that which one needs. Durand de Saint-Pourcain, who often enough formed a party of his own, and who opposed the idea of the special co-operation of God, was nevertheless in favour of a certain predetermination. He believed that God saw in the state of the soul, and of its surroundings, the reason for his determinations.

331. The ancient Stoics were in that almost of the same opinion as the Thomists. They were at the same time in favour of determination and against necessity, although they have been accused of attaching necessity to everything. Ciecero says in his book De Fato that Democritus, Heraclitus, Empedocles and Aristotle believed that fate implied necessity; that others were opposed to that (he means perhaps Epicurus and the Academicians); and that Chrysippus sought a middle course. I think that Cicero is mistaken as regards Aristotle, who fully recognized contingency and freedom, and went even too far, saying (inadvertently, as I think) that propositions on contingent futurities had no determinate truth; on which point he was justifiably abandoned by most of the Schoolmen. Even Cleanthes, the teacher of Chrysippus, although he upheld the determinate truth of future events, denied their necessity. Had the Schoolmen, so fully convinced of this determination of contingent futurities (as were for instance the Fathers of Coimbra, authors of a famous Course of Philosophy), seen the connexion between things in the form wherein the System of General Harmony proclaims it, they would have judged that one cannot admit preliminary certainty, or determination of futurition, without admitting a predetermination of the thing in its causes and in its reasons.

Scotus on the Scandal of Philosophy

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.

Marilyn Adams on History of Philosophy

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

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 the topic 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 found here of amateurish theologians who attempt a coherent historical narrative of "how we got here" without bothering 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

Robert Prentice and Illuminationism

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.

Narrative, Philosophy, and the History of Philosophy

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

The Franciscan Convent at Avignon

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.

Points of Disagreement between Scotists and Thomists

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

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.

Franciscan and Dominican Inquisitions

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.

"Inspired Metaphysics"

From a review by Mark Wenzinger of Inspired Metaphysics? Gustav Siewerth's Hermaneutic Reading of the Onto-Theological Tradition by Andrzej Wiercinski.

Much of continental "post-modern" philosophy stands in great need of being disabused of its prejudiced notion that ancient and medieval philosophy is simply onto-theology that seeks only to valorize "presence" by suppressing absence and alterity, all in order to secure a foundation of mastery and control over the totality of the contexts in which human life is lived

[...]

.... Inspired Metaphysics serves as a valuable introduction not only to the thought of Siewerth in particular, but also to the hermeneutic manner of reading both the Thomistic and continental traditions in general. Not the least of the book's many merits is its exposition of the unfortunate manner in which Siewerth himself, seeking to distinguish Thomistic metaphysics from that which Heidgger took to be onto-theology, failed in hermeneutical charity by being content to demonize Scotistic metaphysics as the source of Western philosophy's alleged forgetfulness of Being. In like manner, as Wiercinski points out, much of contemporary Catholic theology likewise fails hermeneutically by uncritically accepting Heidegger's equation of metaphysics with onto-theology and an alleged valorization of "presence", a term that is in fact highly equivocal and that need not at all be understood as Heidegger himself understood it. Contemporary Catholic theology therefore needs to find its own way back to a hermeneutically sensitive appropriation of Scholastic thought, which would involve first, the effort to recognize Thomism and Scotism as mutually complementary, rather than mutually exclusive, manners of philosophical and theological thinking, and second, the effort to recognize the continuity as well as the discontinuity that obtains between the Scholastic and continental traditions.... The goal of Inspired Metaphysics is precisely to make philosopher and theologian alike better capable of engaging in the ongoing conversation that ought never to cease both within and between the Scholastic and continental traditions.

[...]

Not the least of Wiercinski's contributions to the facilitating of dialogue both between philosophy and theology and between the medieval and continental traditions is his recognition of the baneful effect of Siewerth's reductive and misleading critique of the ontology of Duns Scotus as thought that valorizes conceptually unitary "presence" at the expense of ontological difference and that therefore initiates Western philosophy's forgetfulness of Being. Wiercinski accomplishes for Scotus what Ferdinand Alquie accomplishes for Descartes: a "metaphysical rehabilitation" that shows that Scotus and Thomas can be related to one another in a complementary rather than in a reductively oppositional and antagonistic manner. Wiercinski indicates the possibilities for the renewal of ontology in a post-Heideggerian age that could arise starting with a dialogical reading of the Thomistic and Scotistic metaphysical traditions.

Education, the Liberal Arts, and Philosophy

In the Forward to The Unity of Philosophical Experience Etienne Gilson writes:

The history of philosophy is much more part of philosophy itself than the history of science is part of science, for it is not impossible to become a competent scientist without knowing much about the history of science, but no man can carry very far his own philosophical reflections unless he first studies the history of philosophy.

I am profoundly convinced of the truth of this claim. Both reason and long experience of philosophers who fail to heed this warning demonstrate beyond question that the thoughts of those that do not learn from past sages are solitary, nasty, brutish, poor and short.

Nevertheless it's a pressing question just how much work to put into the historical side of philosophy before daring to begin to think for oneself. Because in principle there's no reason why one should ever put aside the quest for mastery of past systems and begin to reflect afresh. Many find scholars have never done so.

Gilson's remark reminded me of a comment Vos made somewhere in The Philosophy of John Duns Scotus, which I referred to recently. Vos was discussing the opinions of some scholars who tried to find evidence of Scotus reacting to the teachings of Meister Eckhart and vice versa, and Vos states that the likelihood is all against their having ever responded to each other or read each other's writings. He pointed out that we're interested in possible interactions between them because we remember both of their names today and they were roughly contemporaries, but at the time they were two drops in a very big academic bucket. Vos points out that in Scotus' day there were so many doctors and masters and bachelors churning out thousands of pages of brilliant arguments a year that no one of their contemporaries could ever have kept abreast of them all.

In light of the obvious truth of this statement, how do we approach them as historical figures? It's clearly wrong to read a little Plato, a little Aristotle, a little Augustine and Aquinas, move on to Descartes and a few big-name early moderns, and then only read one's contemporaries. But on the other hand, I know very well how an enthusiasm for Aquinas becomes a passion for Aquinas and Bonaventure, and then a love for Aquinas and Bonaventure and Scotus, and then a compulsion to read Aquinas and Bonaventure and Scotus and Albert and Henry and Ockham and Godfrey and Dietrich and on and on, until you realize that mastering even a few decades of philosophy's richer periods is much more than a life's work.

At the same time we must remember that the liberal arts are a necessary precondition for good philosophy, which means that in order to be good philosophers we have to study other things besides philosophers past and present, for instance history, literature, mathematics and the sciences. I think that even the most devoted scholastic-lover, like the authors of this blog, would have to admit that part of the downfall of medieval philosophy was due to its exaltation of logic above the other liberal arts, leading to an imbalance which was "corrected" in terrible ways by people who abandoned rigor and logic almost altogether. This point is suggested by a passage in Armand Maurer's Medieval Philosophy:

One of the results of the rise of speculative grammar was to crowd out of the universities the reading of the Latin classics, which formed an integral part of the teaching of grammar in the earlier Middle Ages. The arts course came to be centered around logic and philosophy, to the neglect of literary studies. Incidentally, this was one of the main reasons for the decline in good Latin style in the latter Middle Ages. The allegorial poem of Henry of Andelys entitled The Battle of the Seven Arts, written about 1250, describes the defeat of Dame Grammar, the champion of the University of Orléans, supported by the humanists and the classical authors, by Dame Logic of the University of Paris. The Muse of Poetry goes into hiding after this defeat, but Henry of Andelys is not discouraged. He foretells the return to the study of classical literature in the next generation. In fact . . . [his] prophecy came true only in the fourteenth century, when Petrach began to revive classical humanism.

But Petrarch, the "first modern man", herald of the Renaissance, was anti-Aristotle and anti-philosophy. But even among those who did not abandon philosophy, the temptation to turn away from the logic of Aristotle to the poetics of Plato - as soon as this became possible - proved overwhelming for many. And when one reads much 14th century scholastic writings one sees that this is inevitable. Certainly the tiers and banks of careful, precise syllogisms in barbarous Latin are very impressive indeed, and the reader rejoices that reason can do so much; at the same time the mind feels the need for other nourishment. I wonder who in the 14th century would have been capable of writing a Metalogicon or Didascalicon, or if it would even have occurred to anyone.

Still, what's the solution? It took years upon years already to qualify for the doctorate in a medieval university; if the arts course wasn't centered on logic and philosophy, when would it get squeezed in? It was only the rigorous philosophical training theologians of that time endured as youths that made the theological glories of their adulthood, so unthinkable today, possible. When did they have time for the classics? My own education, from primary school to doctorate, took twenty-four years. A lot of that time, especially in the first half, was wasted by bad teachers and useless subjects. On the other hand, I did have time to learn and read a great many of the classics in a number of languages. But there is no question that I can't turn out an argument as could the least of my medieval brethren.

The kind of education I received is the kind that leads men to spend fifty years studying what Aquinas or Scotus wrote in fifteen or twenty, and never get one step beyond them. This is not standing on the shoulders of giants, it's standing on their feet and grasping their knees. I don't know how to balance between the dangers of dilettantism on the one hand and barren specialization on the other. It does seem to me that our modern educational system gives us the worst of all possible solutions, an undisciplined, nearly random, practically endless glut of information but without the cultivation of any of the liberal arts at all.