MacIntyre on Scotus

Our recent debate with Mark Wauk reminded me of the authority that Alasdair MacIntyre enjoys in certain circles.  I recently came across a discussion on Scotus in MacIntyre's Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry. I did look in several of his other famous books but did not notice anything on Scotus (there is a chapter in his universities book).  Since Wauk emphasized authority, this first post on MacIntyre will look at his sources.  Now, a caveat:  these are the Gifford lectures, so the sources will be light (note, however, that Broadie's Gifford lectures, The Shadow of Scotus, was replete with bibliography and lengthy latin quotations).

Chapter 4 is on Augustinianism, though not Scotus specifically.  But since MacIntyre reads Scotus as completely motivated by Augustinian concerns it is fair to count up his authorities for this chapter as well as the Scotus chapter. Here I mention only secondary literature, not the primary literature/names he alludes to in abundance. Also, I'm a bit cramped spacewise, so I'm not going to type out the Latin, French, and German titles.

Berkeley (an Augustine scholar)
Chenu, Theology of the Twelfth century.
Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages
Stephen C. Ferruolo, The Origins of the University
Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language
Nietzsche, Der antichrist
T.J. Clarke, The Background and Implications of Duns Scotus' Theory of knowing in the Beatific vision (phd. diss.)
A. Landgraf, Introduction to the theological literature of the early scholastics
De Lubac, Medieval Exegesis
A Collection of essays on the seven liberal arts in the Middle Ages
Baldwin, The Scholastic Culture of the Middle Ages 1000-1300
Leclerc, Love of learning and desire for God
A collection of essays on reform and renewal in the twelfth century
de Ghellinck, The theological movement of the twelfth century.

These are all general studies. There is nothing here that would allow one to distinguish between Bonaventure's "Augustinianism" vs. his "Aristotelianism" or how it differs from those attitudes to isms found in Olivi or Peckham.

Ch. V: Aristotle and/or/against Augustine: Rival Traditions of Enquiry

van Steenberghen, Aristotle in the West
Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant (no scholar now follows Mandonnet...)
van Steenberghen, Thomas Aquinas and the radical Aristotelianism
Donald Davidson, Truth and Interpretation
Feyerabend, Against Method

Some talk of the Averroists, mention of Bonaventure.  The actual medieval scholarship cited here is quite old. I would say that though some scholars do still work on the averroists, no one is painting with broad brush-strokes anymore.

Ch. VII: In the Aftermath of Defeated Tradition

This is the Scotus chapter. I will report any references to Scotus' own works.

Opus Oxoniense IV,43,ii (on the resurrection)
John Boler, on 'abstractive and intuitive cognition' in the Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (quotes a passage about Aquinas)
Aquinas, Com. on Boethius' De trinitate
(there is also a mini review of the Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy)
Ockham, Expositio on Aristotle's Physics.
Boyle, the Setting of the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas
Roensch, Early Thomistic School
Ockham, commentary on II Sent.
John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger's thought (quote is about Meister Eckhart)
Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages

So there you have it. A chapter that trashes Scotus on a variety of topics cites him only on one topic. No actual scholars of Scotus are cited. Boler might count; he has written on the topic of the will in Scotus and it seemed decent enough. But here he is cited regarding Aquinas. In this chapter, then, Scotus is just lumped in with Ockham and late medieval decline.

MacIntyre's view of Scotism

This tidbit is from MacIntyre's new book, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition, p. 100-101

"Scotus's teaching secured him a large following in the later middle ages especially--and not only in the Franciscan order--and an even more numerous following in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some of his views and arguments have been influential in later secular philosophy, most notably perhaps his thesis that being is and must be ascribed univocally, a thesis powerfully reinterpreted by Gilles Deleuze in our own time. Scotus's later Franciscan followers presented his views and arguments as the articulation of a system, giving it the name 'Scotism', so that Scotism and Thomism were presented as two rival scholastic systems. Yet this is misleading. For Scotus is philosophically--not theologically--a significantly less systematic thinker than Aquinas, someone who tends to address problems piecemeal, drawing on his predecessors in a creatively ad hoc manner.

In this respect he is followed by another philosophically remarkable Franciscan, William Ockham (1283-1347). Ockham's work shows Scotus's influence in other ways. Ockham agrees with Scotus and disagrees with Aquinas in holding that the soul is not the form of the body, that embodied human beings do not have the kind of unity that Aquinas ascribed to them."

I almost tremble to post this; in the past I've been part of graduate student reading groups in which certain members, not even all of them Thomists, become exceedingly outraged that someone would dare to criticize the great MacIntyre, flower of catholic intellectuals and fount of philosophy.

But I will make a few remarks...the first being that this is from a very short chapter entitled "After Aquinas". In general, throughout this book we see the generic narratives and metanarratives inherited from 19th century Thomism. The nice thing I will say about the book is that he does at least know enough about Scotus to point out that Aquinas is not the primary target. He even mentions Henry of Ghent, so he is at least somewhat aware of modern scholarship, even if he can't resist following this up by giving brief, bad, descriptions of three or four areas in which Scotus and Aquinas are at odds.

Both the quotes posted are rather absurd. I only post them as there is no one on the popular level defending Scotus, who is constantly maligned by the pomo crowd and the Thomists. Interestingly, it is the contemporary analytic philosophers that give Scotus the honor of actually trying to figure out what he actually said before they criticize him.

Passage 1: This is rather contradictory. Scotus is said to have had a large following in the later middle ages (pshaw--even in his own lifetime and certainly during the 14th century) and the 17th and 18th centuries, but somehow Scotism does not count as a school like Thomism. One would think a large following, filling in the gaps of the master and defending him would count as a school, in fact this seems to be the very definition of a school. But, the usual Thomist practice is that one can count as a Thomist only if one only says what Thomas says and does not add a jot or a tittle, so I can sort of see where MacIntyre is coming from here. Of course, he does admit that there is a Scotist system where theology is concerned, so why no Scotism? And why distinguish between Scotus's theology and philosophy as between systematic and non-systematic? Scotus followed the same method in each: detailed analysis of contemporary opinions followed by the careful exposition of his own opinion. I'm reaching here, I really don't understand what the last two or three sentences of this paragraph are supposed to mean. It just sounds like a cheap, almost political, shot to guarantee that only Thomism is an acceptable candidate for the catholic intellectual.

We can also add that being is not univocal, only the concept of being, and, contra Suarez, the Thomists, the Cambridge Phantasists and Brad Gregory, Scotus accepted 'real' analogy.

Passage 2: This one is just plain stupid and I only included it as it followed directly from the above and it is so patently false and reveals such a poor understanding of the issues that I thought it needed to be pointed out. Pretty much all of the scholastics think that the soul is the form of the body. End of story. The notable exception is Peter of John Olivi, whose views on the matter were condemned at the council of Vienne. Even such a Thomist-leaning theologian as Ludwig Ott in his Fundamentals takes pains to point out that the censure of Olivi has no bearing on the plurality of substantial forms debate, that Scotus' opinion is not also included in the censure. The debate is whether the rational soul informs prime matter directly, or through the mediation of another substantial form, the forma corporeitatis. Scotus holds this latter position, and thinks that all lower forms are in potency to higher forms, with the ultimate actuality of the composite deriving from the rational soul. He can hold this and also that the rational soul is the form of the body, and I have personally come across numerous references attesting to his belief in this latter position (his discussion of the plurality of forms is to be found in his discussion of eucharistic conversion, for any who are interested and do not already know).