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.

Ockham the Scotist?

Ockham begins his Ordinatio with a three hundred seventy page epistemological Prologue, a precedent established in Henry's Summa. The first, seventy-five page, question, misleadingly titled "Whether it is possible for the intellect of a Wayfarer [i.e. a human being still in the present state of life] to have evident knowledge of the truths of theology," is in fact mostly about establishing the distinction between intuitive and abstractive cognition. This distinction was pioneered by Scotus (I've written about it over here), but quickly became standard and is one of the major indicators of earlier versus later scholasticism.

Ockham's account differs from Scotus' in a number of ways. Probably the most significant is that for Scotus intuitive cognition is by definition characterized by the actual existence and presence of the intuited object to the cognitive power apprehending it: when I consider something in the abstract it might exist or might not exist, so far as my ability to think about it is concerned, but if I'm going to see something it really has to be there in front of me; for Ockham, on the other hand, the existence of the intuited object is not strictly necessary. He has a simple argument for this: the object is one thing; the intuitive act, as a quality of my mind, is another, wholly distinct thing; of two separate and distinct created things either one can exist without the other, at least by the power of God; therefore the mental act can exist without the object. - Never mind the problems this raises!

As I mentioned, Scotus seems to have originated the distinction and when Ockham was writing it was not universally established. Some people must not have liked the use Ockham was putting it to, because he seems to have been accused of introducing dangerous novelties into his theology, and he defends himself by appealing to Scotus. This is rich, since Scotus is a kind of intellectual arch-enemy to Ockham, although he's deeply indebted to him even when he's engineering his antipodes. This is an interplay we've written about before. In any case, in this first question Ockham quotes and alludes to Scotus' writings on intuitive and abstractive cognition pretty extensively. Some Scotists seem to have accused him of misinterpreting the Doctor. In places Scotus talks as though the only thing we have direct intellectual intuition of in this life are our own internal acts, while Ockham says that we also have intuition of external sensible objects. He attempts to show that at least in certain places Scotus thinks the same thing. And then, in a remarkable passage:

And if someone should say that elsewhere he claims the opposite, that moves me but little, for I don't take him as an authority, nor do I hold this opinion because he said it, but because I think it true. And if elsewhere he says the opposite, I don't care. But here he holds it, and therefore his followers ought not to condemn it as a novelty.

Et si dicatur quod alibi ponit oppositorum, illud parum movet me, quia non allego eum tamquam auctoritatem, nec dico praedictam opinionem quia ipse dixit eam, sed quia reputo eam veram. Et ideo si alibi dixit oppositum, non curo. Hic tamen tenuit eam, et ideo sequaces sui non debent eam contemnere tamquam novam.

Am I the only one who senses in this outburst of attitude a big chip on Ockham's shoulder about Scotus and the Scotists? This is how Peter Olivi sounds sometimes about Aristotle. Attitude aside, however, it's a salutary sentiment worthy of a real philosopher.

Ockham and Scotus and Natural Theology

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

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

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

A Ramble on Ockham, Scholarship, and Other Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scotus' Razor

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

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

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

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

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

The Anti-Razor

Dr Feser fairly recently had a post about Ockham's razor, and perhaps it was remembering this that made me sit up when I came across the "anti-razor", formulated in the Scotist work (anonymous, despite the title) Logica Campsale Anglicj, valde utilis et realis contra Ockham, that is, The Logic of the Englishman Campsall, very useful and realist, against Ockham. It goes like this:

Whenever some affirmative proposition is verified about things, if one thing does not suffice to verify such such a proposition, one must posit two, and if two do not suffice, three, and so on to infinity.

In his preface to the critical edition to Ockham's Quodlibeta Septem, Joseph Wey notes that the same principle was formulated by Walter of Chatton. I translate from p. *35:

It may be useful to note here that Chatton also frequently employs a limiting principle or rule . . . which can be called a certain "anti-razor" or complement of the principle of parsimony, namely 'When a proposition is verified about things, if two things do not suffice to verify the proposition, one must posit a third.' Ockham does not accept this rule, but rather vehemently opposes it.

Gideon Gal discusses the authorship of pseudo-Campsall's anti-Ockhamist logic in the preface to the critical edition of Ockham's Summa Logicae. There's a funny remark in there which seems to imply that the logical debates in early 14th-century Franciscan England were damaging to fraternal charity. The Campsall-logic can't have been by John of Rodington, he says on *60-*61:

Furthermore, John of Rodington, who as they say was a very holy man, did not adhere so faithfully to the doctrine of the Subtle Doctor nor so bitterly opposed the doctrine of the Inceptor as the author of the Logic against Ockham. If anyone were to say that the author is John of Reading, we could well believe him . . . It seems to us that some of the things he said and wrote are very similar to those which William Ockham found vain and ridiculous and rebuked in the Summa Logicae . . . this can easily explain the acrimony of the author against Ockham, especially if their contention took place in a single academic community [coram scholaribus communibus].

Gal goes on to discuss the anti-razor as well as the case for and against Walter of Chatton and the anti-Ockham being one and the same.

In any case, as the editor of the anti-Ockham notes, the anti-razor has been independently formulated by a modern author, K. Menger, in "A Counterpart of Ockham's Razor in Pure and Applied Mathematics: Ontological Uses," Synthese 12 (1960), 415:

. . . what is needed is a counterpart to the Law of Parsimony - so to speak, a law against Miserliness - stipulating that entities must not be reduced to the point of inadequacy and, more generally, that it is vain to try to do with fewer what requires more.

The benefit, such as it is, of the Ockhamist metaphysics is that it's clean and tidy, wiping all the conceptual barnacles and encrustments off the mental slate. The main critique of the formalizantes must always be that its wild and florid growth produces a profusion of pseudo-entities multiplying out of control. The goal of metaphysics, however, is not to produce either an invigoratingly pure and arid conceptual desert, nor an exciting and exotic conceptual rainforest, but to understand reality as it is. So metaphysics will have to do with the right amount of entities, neither more nor less than necessity demands.

If Faber and I ever get around to producing for public consumption an edition or translation or modern rewriting of the Diologus curiosus inter Dunxsistam et Okamistam, "A Curious Dialogue between a Scotist and an Ockhamist," no doubt the anti-razor will resurface.

Ockham Quodlibet I.8

The question asks whether angels can be moved in a vacuum. Before deciding this, Ockham very sensibly says, we must first determine if a vacuum can exist. He says that it can. For imagine that God should annihilate or uncreate the Earth, while conserving everything in the heavens the way they are. Then there would be nothing where the Earth used to be, and then there would be a vacuum.

If you were to insist that natural laws would require an inrushing of stuff into the void in order to full and thus eliminate the vacuum, Ockham says that so long as this doesn't happen instantaneously (and motion never occurs instantaneously), there would be some period of time however short in which a vacuum was present.

So, given that there can be a vacuum, angels can move in it. There are some additional complications thrown into the question, of course, but they're not to thrilling. The next question is about the composition of the continuum and that should be more interesting.

Ockham Quodlibet I.6-7

Can one angel speak to another? No of course not, because they can't hear; obviously they don't have ears! [This is actually the first argument in the question.]

But seriously, folks. Angels converse with mental speech and mental hearing, in other words by pure thought. For a concept, a mental word, is nothing but the act itself of cognition. Mentally speaking, then, is nothing other than to think in such a way that oneself or someone else can understand what is being thought about, and mental hearing is nothing other than to apprehend someone else's act of thought.

Ockham gives authorities for his view that concepts are nothing other than thought-acts, but his attempts are not convincing. Before he held this view Ockham had held his so-called fictum theory, according to which concepts are mental entities "feigned" or invented by the mind to signify its objects, but obviously he's abandoned that by the time of his quodlibet.

One interesting point in this question is his claim that in the ordinary course of nature neither an angel nor a man is able to hide his thoughts from other angels. Rather angels do not access our thoughts only because God does not allow it.

The seventh question also seems motivated by Ockham's anti-concept stance. He asks whether an angel can pass on to another knowledge which he has habitually, without actually thinking it in the process. He says that hit can, so long as the object about which the receiving angel is learning is something it already has some actual knowledge about. Ockham appears to be saying something to the effect that one angel can remember something he has actually experienced by means of another angel's memories, which strikes me as odd.

About things of which the passive angel does not have direct experience, however, only the actually-thought thoughts of the teaching angel can give him knowledge, especially about singulars.

Finally, Ockham says that angels can have discursive thought.

Ockham Quodlibet I.4-5

In the next two questions Ockham discusses angels and physics. The first asks whether an angel is in a place through his substance. Ockham first defines place in Aristotelian terms as the terminus of the containing body of what is in place, and then distinguishes between being in place circumscriptively and definitively. The first is when part of the placed is in part of the place and the whole is in the whole place. The second is when the whole placed is in the whole place - as Christ is in the Eucharist.

So then, an angel can be in place definitively but not circumscriptively. Ockham doesn't say this, but the case seems to me to be basically parallel to the way the human mind is in the body: the angel can be in any place the way that my body is the place of my mind. An angel is not in place the way God is, for God is present both to this place and also to every other place at once, which is not true of an angel. Furthermore, an angel cannot have a point as his place, since points as places do not exist. If there were real indivisible points which were the terminus of a containing body, the angel could be contained by them, but there aren't. Furthermore, there is a maximum size of the place an angel can be present at, since he is finite and limited by nature, but Ockham makes no effort to determine what this size might be. There is no minimum-sized place, and angels can coexist in a single place. Although O. doesn't draw the connection, it seems that this implies there is no limit to the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. This question, however, has been resolved elsewhere.

Question five builds on four to ask whether angels can be moved in place. First he defines local motion as "the successive coexistence, without an intervening rest, of something continually existing in place through diverse places" [motus localis est coexistentia successiva, sine quiete media, alicuius continue existentis in loco diversis locis].

The reason it seems that angels cannot be moved is their impartibility and indivisibility. Wouldn't any change of place for an indivisible substance have to be instantaneous? Ockham replies that when Aristotle states that in motion you always have a part of the moved in one place and part in another, he is only speaking about things which exist in place circumscriptively; but as we just saw, angels are not in place this way, but definitively. The angel's change in place happens in accordance with the manner in which he occupies a place even at rest.

Finally, in replying to an obscure objection based on a comment by Walter Chatton, Ockham gives an interesting counterfactual argument that sounds like modern possible-worlds talk. The discussion in this section is about how many things have to exist in order to verify a proposition. The Chatton-inspired objection states that in order to verify that an angel is created by God a period of time, or at least an instant, must exist for the verification to take place. I translate the counter-argument:

Assume that first of all God creates an angel together with a book, in which the proposition ["this angel is created by God"] is written, without [creating] the world; afterwards he creates the world, along with motion and time; afterwards he destroys the world and motion and time, [so that the state of things is] as before. Then this proposition "this angel is created by God" is true before the creation of the world, and after the destruction of the world it is false; and nevertheless as many things exist after the destruction of the world as there were before creation, and nevertheless it was then true and now is false. From which it is manifestly clear that sometimes three things are sufficient to verify this proposition, and sometimes they are not sufficient.

Since this is absurd, Ockham denies that time is a necessary condition for the truth of any proposition. What does this have to do with local motion? I have to admit that's rather obscure to me.

Ockham Quodlibet I.3

This question asks whether in God paternity is distinct from the Father. Ockham notes, "This question is not about names but about the reality." That is, logically speaking of course the abstract property "paternity" is distinguished from the concrete suppositum of whom it is predicated; but is there any distinction in reality?

Ockham notes that every distinction is either real or formal or rational. In the first case one of the two distinct things can exist apart from the other; in the third case the two distinct things are distinct only in the mind. In the second case, you have a formal distinction when you have things such that something is the same as one of the distinct things and not the other, as in: the Son is the essence and is not the Father, therefore the Father and the essence are formally distinct.

[An aside: recall that in Quod. I.2 Ockham made it clear that the accepts the formal distinction only for distinguishing the persons from the essence in God and nowhere else. Generally then he accepts only two kinds of distinction, real and rational. This is why they call it his razor! Compare with more luxurious accounts of distinctions. For instance, the Scotist Petrus Thomae in his own Quodlibet, q.7, gives a very different classification of distinctions. First there are distinctions of reason, founded only on a mental act, and then there are distinctions not dependent on a mental act, real distinctions. But real distinctions can be broken down into 1) Essential distinctions, between essence and essence, which can be known by separability in actual existence or by essential dependence, since nothing is dependent on itself; 2) Distinctions between thing and thing, rather than between essence and essence, which can be known e.g. by causal dependence; 3) Distinctions between reality and reality, known by whether one can be abstracted without the other; 4) Distinctions between thing and reality - the difference is that a thing has a reality belonging to it, while a reality must have a thing of which it is; 5) Distinctions between formality and formality, with multiple ways to recognize is; 6) Distinctions between formality and thing, known by the lack of adequation between the two, since one thing can have many formalities but not vice versa, or by the fact that the thing is principle and the formality something pertaining to it. Petrus Thomae has at least one other way of formulating the distinction tree, but you get the idea. Even though Scotus also recognizes the principle of parsimony, it's not called Scotus' razor for a reason.]

Anyway, Ockham says that you can't think as though the Father were constituted from the coinciding of the divine essence and active generation. There's not some property of paternity which makes the Father himself; rather the Father just is paternity in God. The Father can't be constituted by paternity, because he just is paternity, and nothing can constitute itself. Similarly the Son just is filiation in God, etc. There is a legitimate formal distinction between the Father and the divine essence and a real distinction between the Father and the Son. But those are all the distinctions there are in God which don't arise from our own thinking about him.

Ockham Quodlibet I.2

In this question Ockham asks whether the relations of origin of the persons in God are distinct from the divine essence. Here we see him begrudgingly admitting Scotus' formal distinction in this case only, while rejecting it everywhere else in metaphysics or theology.

In a certain sense God's essence must be distinct from the relations of origin, and not merely notionally distinct, because it is the case that "the essence is three persons, and paternity is not three persons". But because of divine simplicity on the one hand and the separability criterion (presumably) on the other, it can't be a quote-unquote "real" distinction either. It has to be a formal distinction, though Ockham doesn't use the term until later on in the question when replying to objections. Logic simply requires the distinction here, but O. clearly isn't too happy about it, and he says "Nor do I posit any distinction or non-identity small or great other than" this one in God. But if we don't posit this one we get a straight contradiction.

This is a pretty big deal. The other interesting thing about this question is that we see Ockham trying to clear up a lot of difficulties using supposition theory, that is, the theory of reference in late mediaeval logic. This sort of logical analysis is, so far as I know, not to be found in Thomas or Bonaventure, or in Scotus either, and it shows both Ockham's devotion to logic-based solutions whenever possible and also his habitual use of contemporary developments in the art. Ockham himself was, of course, a great logician, and his Summa logicae one of the greatest books in the history of logic.

Anyway these supposition-based solutions are summed up in a catch-all sentence: "I say that all these paralogisms, whether affirmative or negative, are resolved by [accusing them of] the fallacy of the accident, such that in all the case some term is taken as supposing [supponens] for one absolute thing, which is [in fact] several relative things; and it suffices to apply [this point to all the arguments].

Ockham Quodlibet I.1

Okham opens his first quodlibet with Scotus-bashing from the outset. This first question gives us a good look at the way Ockham generally uses Scotus, that is, by referring to him in order to reject him, or by accepting one bit of Scotus' thought as a preliminary to discarding and refuting the rest. It also gives us a peek at his famous philosophical and theological minimalism.

The question is whether it can be proved by natural reason that there is only one God (spoilers: Ockham says no). He begins his answer by considering two "descriptions" of God: 1) God is something nobler or better than anything other than himself; 2) God is that than which nothing is better or more perfect. Note that 1) presumes God's unity while 2) leaves open the possibility of things just as good and perfect as God, though no more so.

First Ockham considers 1). According to description 1) it cannot be proved that God exists. But if it could be proved, then it could also be proved that there is only one God - Ockham uses Scotus' argument to show this. Nevertheless he doesn't think that we can prove the existence either of the "Anselmian" God or even that of a more moderately-conceived "Supreme Being". It seems that Ockham's general preference for physics over metaphysics leads him to accept proofs for a first mover, or a source of all contingent effects, but not the metaphysical arguments which are necessary to demonstrate God's more remote properties - infinity, for instance.

If we take description 2), we can neither prove God's unity nor demonstratively prove that God's unity cannot be proved. (Does this remind anyone else of Gödel?) But, taking 2), it can be demonstrated that God exists, otherwise we could have an infinite regress of good things. But God's unity (like most of his attributes) must be taken on faith. It cannot be proved that God knows or loves other things, "for many philosophers have considered that God neither understands nor wills something other than himself." Similarly it cannot be demonstrated that God is intensively infinite, nor that he is free.

Ockham must have Aristotle in mind most of all as a philosopher who (using physics, of course) proved God's existence but not these other attributes. However, it's not at all clear to me that the fact that many philosophers could not prove them proves that they are not provable by natural reason. For other explanations we need look no further than the opening chapters of St Thomas' Contra gentiles. But for Ockham all such "proofs" rest on doubtful or debatable principles. Accordingly, he considers a number of Scotus' arguments for these points and then rejects them all on similar grounds.

June is Ockham Month at The Smithy

My mentor and dissertation director Timothy Noone used to say that you can't know if you're a Scotist until you've grappled seriously with Ockham. I haven't read much Ockham since the graduate course I took on him some years ago, and it seems to me it's time to brush up. I'll be doing a little of that grappling this month.

People who don't read either frequently talk as though Scotus leads directly to Ockham: univocity and voluntarism to nominalism, the division of faith and reason, rebellion against the Church, and then Protestantism! Ergo Scotus is bad, Q.E.D.

Now this is a little like saying that Plato is bad because he leads to Nietzsche, insofar as without Plato there couldn't have been a tradition of Western metaphysics for Nietzsche to undermine. More seriously, it's like blaming Husserl for Heidegger, since Heidegger's thought is "phenomenological" and couldn't have arisen without Husserl, even though Husserl quite accurately described Heidegger as his "antipodes".

Ockham is Scotus' antipodes. Both British, both Franciscan, both post-Thomist pre-"decadence" scholastic system-builders who were responsible for much of the direction of philosophy and theology for at least the next century, still they don't have much in common. Seriously.

By the way, speaking of both Scotus and Ockham, recently I've heard more than one philosopher say - in a way that suggests that the opinion is pretty uncontroversial - that David Hume is the greatest philosopher ever to come out of the British Isles. That's pretty rich.

Anyhow, this month I'll be reading Ockham's first Quodlibet and commenting on it here. It has twenty questions, so - given that I probably won't post every day but probably can most days - that should be about right for June. Meanwhile perhaps Faber or Br Guzman will vary it up a bit. After that it's back to Scotus, but if Ockham turns out to be popular (to the limited extent possible!) there are seven Quodlibets, each with around twenty questions, which altogether present a pretty good mosaic of Ockham's thought, so I would definitely consider doing another Ockham month in the future.

The first post in the series will come tomorrow.

Democritus to the Reader

A labyrinth of intractable questions, unprofitable contentions, incredibilem delirationem, one calls it. If school divinity be so censured, subtilis Scotus, lima veritatis, Occam irrefragabilis, cuius ingenium vetera omnia ingenia subvertit, Thomas himself, Doctor Seraphicus, cui dictavit angelus, what can she plead? what can her followers say for themselves? Much learning cere-diminuit-brum, hath cracked their sconce . . .

--Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy