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.

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.

Some Elementary Metaphysics

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

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

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

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

Christian Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self-Identity, Infinite Regress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jews and Philosophy

Quotes the Maverick Philosopher:

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

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

Sed Contra, says Roger Bacon:

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

Men Great and Mediocre

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

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

St. John of the Cross and Natural Reason

St. John of the Cross affirms the natural powers of human reason to a degree that may surprise those less acquainted with the philosophic foundations of his thought. Often people reduce him to the label “mystic” (which for them means something mysterious) and they notice, with a glance at the Table of Contents of his works, that he writes much about extraordinary spiritual phenomena (e.g., locutions, tricks of the devil, union with God that “annihilates” the natural faculties); they then suppose that the Carmelite master thinks that the spiritual life consists mostly in these things. But the following passages highlight a little-emphasized aspect of his teaching: a robust emphasis of the goodness and power of natural reason.

For example, St. John of the Cross discusses why, under the law of grace, we ought to shy away from looking for extraordinary supernatural knowledge. Regarding faith, his basic position is that reason, enlightened by the revelation brought in Christ and purified by grace, is in principle more than sufficient for us to grasp the truths of the faith and all matters touching on or leading up to it (see Ascent of Mt Carmel 2.22.3). St. John of the Cross eschews both what we could call supernaturalism and fideism: the first being the attitude of those who want “special signs” in order to grasp God’s will; the second being those who wrongly think that the mind’s natural powers are insufficient to understand natural truths.These tendencies are interconnected.

A number of scholars have noted the Carmelite’s rejection of supernaturalism (see Garrigou-Lagrange’s discussions about how to treat “extraordinary charismatic phenomena"). His position against any desire for extraordinary supernatural knowledge is best summed up in a passage that simultaneously affirms the power of natural reason as well as reason illumined by faith:

“There is no necessity for any of this kind of knowledge since one can get sufficient guidance from natural reason and the law and doctrine of the Gospel” (Ascent 2.21.4).

We should not that here he is speaking of natural reason freed from slavery to the appetites, purified from all disordered attachments to lower things. St. John of the Cross insists that we give priority to the judgment of reason, which means that we should trust the ability of natural reason to reach a great deal of truth:

“We should make such use of reason and the law of the Gospel that, even though—whether we desire it or not—some supernatural truths are told to us, we accept only what is in harmony with reason and the Gospel law. And then we should receive this truth, not because it is privately revealed to us, but because it is reasonable, and we should brush aside all feelings about the revelation. We ought, in fact, to consider and examine the reasonableness of the truth when it is revealed even more than when it is not, since in order to delude souls the devil says much that is true, conformed to reason, and will come to pass” (Ibid.).

When natural reasoning is working properly, the Carmelite says, “There is no difficulty or necessity that cannot be solved by these means, which are very pleasing to God and profitable to souls.” But, on the other hand, when the power of natural reason is implicitly denied through a supernaturalism, a desire to receive special knowledge through extraordinary means, he says:

“I consider a desire to know things through supernatural means far worse than a desire for spiritual gratifications in the sensitive part of the soul. I fail to see how a person who tries to get knowledge in this supernatural way — as well as the one who commands this or gives consent — can help but sin, at least venially, no matter how excellent the motives or advanced in perfection that person may be” (Ibid.).

Whereas St. John’s rejection of supernaturalism has been appreciated by some, less noticed, perhaps, has been St. John’s rejection of fideism. Without using the language of “fideism”, he says that Moses did not require special supernatural help to arrive at a prudential decision to appoint 72 elders to help him determine matters of law. Sufficient for this was his power of reason which helped him weigh the advice of his father-in-law Jethro:

God approved this advice. But he did not give it, because human reason and judgment were sufficient means for solving this problem. Usually God does not manifest such matters through visions, revelations, and locutions, because he is ever desirous that insofar as possible people take advantage of their own reasoning powers. All matters must be regulated by reason save those of faith, which though not contrary to reason transcend it (Ascent 2.22.13).

The Carmelite friar goes on to explain that sometimes God does indeed give extraordinary communications to people, but that these communications could easily make the recipient worse:

“On judgment day God will punish the faults and sins of many with whom he communed familiarly here below and to whom he imparted much light and power, for they neglected their obligations and trust in the their converse with him and the power he bestowed on them” (Ascent 2.22.15).

One might wonder why God, in communing with his friends, did not reveal their duties and their faults to them. It could seem odd that God would impart them “much light and power” about many things, but not about what is most important for the individual: the state of his own soul. St. John replies: “It was unnecessary for God himself to inform them of these faults, since he had already done so through the natural law and the reasoning powers he had bestowed on them” (Ibid.). Hence, one of the chief faults of those who receive what we now call extraordinary charismatic graces is that they failed to reflect upon certain things which were knowable by reason, that is, truths treated in what is typically called “natural philosophy.” Hence, St. John’s critique of those who confuse matters of natural prudence with those of the faith, or look for supernatural enlightenment regarding natural matters, could be called a critique of fideism understood in a broad sense.

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.

Wanting to Be Someone Else

Suppose that some person all of a sudden becomes the king of China, but only on the condition that he forgets what he has been, as if he were born anew; practically, or as far as the effects could be perceived, wouldn't that be the same as if he were annihilated and a king of China created at the same instant in his place? That is something this individual would have no reason to desire.

- Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, c.34.

If you wish even to be equal to Peter in glory, you will be; I say "in glory", for you are not able to will to be Peter in person: for if you were to will this, you would will for yourself to be nothing - which you cannot will.

- Alexander of Canturbury, De S. Anselmi similitudinibus, c.64.

This issue comes up in theology, because the Devil's sin is said to be desiring to be equal to God. But how can a creature desire to be equal to God? This would be the same as desiring to be God, which is equivalent to desiring not to be a creature, which is to desire not to exist, or to desire that a finite creature be infinite and uncreated, which is a contradiction, and, as Aristotle says, impossibles do not lie within the realm of choice.

In the Ordinatio, Book II D.6 Q.1, Scotus resolves this difficulty by noting that there are two equivocal ways of understanding choice. One, the kind of choice Aristotle meant when he said that choice is about what is possible, is the termination of a practical syllogism: when I deliberate about the range of means available to achieve my goals, and my mind determines which is the best means for the best end, my will responds by choosing that end. So when I deliberate about how to get from Maryland to California, I weigh the possibility of getting groped by a government goon at the airport against the labor and expense and time of driving, and wonder whether in fact I want to make the trip at all. At length I make my choice. I don't deliberate about whether to teleport or take a wormhole shuttle, because these are not real possibilities for me.

However, in another sense I can incline my will towards anything my intellect can apprehend, whether possible for me or not. And my intellect can apprehend any proposition formed from simple intelligibles. "Being equal to God" is something my mind can grasp, since I can grasp that there is such a thing as God exists; and I can recognize that "Being equal to God" is something the will can desire, since God the Son can will to be equal to God the Father. - Likewise "being the king of China" or "being St Peter" is something I can recognize as intelligible, possible, and willable in itself. This doesn't imply that the object of my apprehension is possible for me and so able to be the subject of my will as a practical choice. Wishing for time travel is like this, in my opinion. The past was once the present, and so "being at such-and-such a date in the past" is intelligible and was once actual for certain people. So saying "I wish I were in 1310" is intelligible. There's no intrinsic contradiction about being in 1310. The only contradiction is in thinking that it's possible for me, as this person here and now, to be in the past. That would be more or less like me wishing to be Peter. Peter may exist, and I may imagine what it's like to be him, imagine having his experiences and so forth; but whoever is having Peter's experiences is Peter, not me. I can imagine the past, and wish that my own present was happening in medieval Oxford rather than modern America, but whoever had a life in medieval Oxford could not be me, since my life is necessarily the one being lived by me right now.

There must be some sort of disorder in the will if one wills for oneself what is impossible for oneself. The implication in such an act of will is that God's will in creating me was wrong, and instead of creating me he should have created something different, or abstained from creating. I thus set up my will in opposition to God's as superior. This is intrinsically different from willing unactualized possibilities for myself, such as being stronger, being wiser, being more virtuous (even being more wealthy), even desiring things which are possible but over which I have no power: that's the point of petitionary prayer.

It strikes me that some such set of distinctions as this can allow us to avoid the pitfalls of Nietzschean resentment, on the one hand, and the Nietzschean will of the eternal return, on the other. For if it's sinful to will in vain that one's life and past and possibilities were those of other people, or that they should consist in incompatible elements, it's also sinful to complacently accept my life, past and present, as completely good, necessary, unchangeable, and perfectly willable, even though this isn't true. Instead I must recognize what is possible but not actual for myself, past present and future, allowing the necessary room for repentance about the past, effort in the present, and resolutions about the future.

Mediaeval and Modern Logics I

Nevertheless, it is still a medieval world of thought we meet in Duns Scotus’ oeuvre, expressed with the help of scholastic tools, invented and elaborated on in Latin based semantics and logic. However, this world of thought does not depend essentially on these scholastic tools. We may pile up a list of famous names from modern logic and philosophy who have established theories Duns Scotus’ philosophy is definitely in need of: Cantor – Frege, Russell and Beth – Lewis, Kanger and Hintikka – Kripke and Plantinga – Wittgenstein, Ryle and Austin. We can also compose a list of crucial theories: the theory of sets and, in particular, the theory of infinite sets (Cantor), the theory of logical connectives and the logic of quantifiers (Frege, Beth), the logic of relation and identity (Russell, Whitehead). In general, modern standard logic is an excellent tool to translate, to extrapolate and to defend Scotian theories in combination with the ‘linguistic turn’ (Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin). Moreover, modal logic (Lewis, Kanger, Hintikka) and the ontology of possible worlds (Kripke, Plantinga) are crucial theories to discuss adequately Duns Scotus’ ontology and philosophical and theological doctrines of God.

-Antoine Vos, The Philosophy of John Duns Scotus, 8.

I really wish that Vos made clear somewhere in his book exactly which theories by these guys Scotus' philosophy is "definitely in need of." He doesn't, so far as I recall, and so I'm left very dubious. In fact I've long suspected that set theory and its use in the foundation of modern logic has had an almost completely pernicious effect on modern philosophy, emphatically including the so-called "linguistic turn" and possible world theorizing. The common element in all of these seems to me to be a systematic conflating of the logical with the ontological order, to the detriment of the latter. When contemporary philosophy lays down at its very beginning a set of premises making it difficult if not impossible to distinguish between ens realis and ens rationis, it guarantees a failed metaphysics.

My own opinion is that, if mediaeval philosophy can take useful supplements from modern thought, these are more likely to come through the phenomenological than through the linguistic-analytical traditions. (This is what St Edith Stein tried to do, though I haven't studied her very thoroughly yet and can't say how successful she was.) One has to acknowledge, though, that philosophers today attempting to "encounter" mediaeval philosophy through the lens of either tradition are much more likely to spoil and ruin it than to enhance it.

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.

Symposium

Instead of dutifully reading Ockham today I've been reading the Symposium and Allan Bloom's commentary. I confess that whenever I read Plato I feel that he is both the most beautiful and most profound of philosophers and become tempted to just keep reading him and ignore all his footnoters.

I remember vividly the first time I read the Symposium, at fifteen or sixteen, in the old Jowett translation in the Britannica Great Books set. It certainly made more of an impression on me than any of the other Plato I read around the same. I'll never forget my initial impression at the speech of Aristophanes, which I didn't understand was supposed to be funny and found simply absurd and ludicrous and a bit grotesque.

And too I remember vividly the second time I read it, a few years later as a college freshman. For many years at St John's College there had been a tradition of making the Symposium seminar an actual symposium, with everyone drinking and talking. Federal funding regulations had made this wise and beneficent custom impracticable for a program in which Plato comes in the first year when nearly all the participants were underage, and by the time I got there the practice had been "officially" discontinued. Unofficially, however, most people got plenty drunk beforehand and a few intrepid souls snuck their wine into class in things like Snapple bottles. I stayed totally sober - I was very careful not to drink for the first two years of college - and participated in the discussion and watched in amazement as various usually dour or carefree or vice-hardened classmates began to pour their hearts out, some even weeping, as we all wondered together about love and beauty and transcendence and being fundamentally incomplete.

Perhaps part of the reason that Plato has such attractions for me is (in addition to his astonishing excellence) merely personal, in that I read so much of him as a freshman, which was such a formative period and has so many intense associations. For instance, I can't read the Phaedrus without thinking of another seminar, after which I met up with my girlfriend who had just had her own (at St John's all the seminars in the College happen at the same time, from 8-10 PM on Monday and Thursday nights; it's almost like a community liturgy around which all other time is structured). We were talking and she mentioned how proud she was that we had kept the black horses of our souls in check so well, which was ironic, for I had partly spent my seminar worrying that my own black horse might be champing at the bit more than I could handle.

Anyway. I read a great deal besides my studies in scholastic philosophy and theology, but since the blog is explicitly centered around these, it's always hard to tell what place if any other matter have here. "What's this tripe?" I can hear my vast crowd of frothing readers protest. "We came here for the good stuff, and he's trying to pass off his nostalgia instead of thinking like a man!" Fair enough. Back to the trenches tomorrow.

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.

Infinity

In an interesting post "Paradoxicon" discusses Aquinas and Scotus on God's infinity. He gives the following passage from Aquinas' Summa theologiae Q.7 a.1:

We must consider therefore that a thing is called infinite because it is not finite. Now matter is in a way made finite by form, and the form by matter. Matter indeed is made finite by form, inasmuch as matter, before it receives its form, is in potentiality to many forms; but on receiving a form, it is terminated by that one. Again, form is made finite by matter, inasmuch as form, considered in itself, is common to many; but when received in matter, the form is determined to this one particular thing. Now matter is perfected by the form by which it is made finite; therefore infinite as attributed to matter, has the nature of something imperfect; for it is as it were formless matter. On the other hand, form is not made perfect by matter, but rather is contracted by matter; and hence the infinite, regarded on the part of the form not determined by matter, has the nature of something perfect. Now being is the most formal of all things, as appears from what is shown above (4, 1, Objection 3). Since therefore the divine being is not a being received in anything, but He is His own subsistent being as was shown above (Question 3, Article 4), it is clear that God Himself is infinite and perfect.”

Then the following from Scotus' De primo principio c.4:

Finally some argue to the proposed conclusion from the absence of any intrinsic cause. Since form is limited by matter, any form incapable of being in matter therefore is infinite. I do not think this argument is any good, because [its proponents] admit an angel is immaterial, but not infinite. And existence will never limit [its] essence, since they hold that it is posterior to essence. Now the intrinsic degree of perfection that any entity has is not just a vicarious possession. Furthermore, it is a fallacy of the consequent to argue that just because form is limited with reference to matter, therefore without such reference it is unlimited. [This is like arguing] one body is limited with reference to another, hence where there is no such reference a body will be infinite; hence the outermost heaven will be infinite. This is the fallacy of the Physics, Bk. III. Just as a body is first limited in itself, so too with form. Form is first limited in itself (because there is just this sort of nature among things) before it is limited by matter since the latter limitation presupposes but does not cause the first. An essence is first finite by nature, and hence is unable to be made finite by existence; hence it is not subsequently limited by existence.

Then he seems to get slightly confused. He writes:

Scotus isn’t talking about the hypothetical fallacy of affirming the consequent when he mentions the “fallacy of the consequent” (which Aristotle never directly addressed ). He means rather a violation of the rules of conversion regarding the relation of implication or (logical) dependence, described by Aristotle in the Sophistical Refutations:
"The refutation which depends upon the consequent arises because people suppose that the relation of consequence is convertible. For whenever, suppose A is, B necessarily is, they then suppose also that if B is, A necessarily is. This is also the source of the deceptions that attend opinions based on sense-perception. For people often suppose bile to be honey because honey is attended by a yellow colour: also, since after rain the ground is wet in consequence, we suppose that if the ground is wet, it has been raining; whereas that does not necessarily follow."

Paradoxicon seems to be unaware of how the scholastics used the phrase "affirming the consequent", which does not just mean "asserting a fallacious consequent, i.e., one that doesn’t follow (formally) from the premises" - in other words, a non sequitur. Rather the way Scotus argues here is regularly called "fallacy of the consequent" in mediaeval logic textbooks, for instance in Peter of Spain's Summulae logicales VII.150 et seq.

So Scotus accuses Aquinas' argument for God's infinity of "affirming the consequent" because it argues to God's infinity from his immateriality in the same way that in Aristotle's example someone argues to its having been raining because the ground is wet. Scotus accuses Aquinas of implicitly making the following argument:

A. Everything immaterial is infinite
B. God is immaterial
C. Therefore God is infinite

And getting A this way:

if something is material it is finite
Therefore if something is not material it is not finite

which is clearly fallacious. I'm not sure why Paradoxicon says that this isn't the fallacy of the consequent, though. Peter of Spain gives a precisely parallel argument to illustrate the fallacy of the consequent:

If something is a man it is an animal
Therefore if something is not a man it is not an animal

In any case, not even Aquinas believes (A), rather he believes

A1 Some immaterial thing is infinite,

as well as

A2 Some immaterial thing is finite

because angels are immaterial but not infinite. But you can't derive (C) from (B) and either (A1) or (A2).

Aquinas doesn't simply make that argument, of course, because in addition to God's immateriality he adduces the fact that God is "ipsum esse" and not received in any limiting or restricting principle. So he would say that the angels are not infinite, while God is, because angels have restricted esse while God does not. Scotus points out, though, that even according to Aquinas the essence of a creature is not restricted by esse, but rather esse is restricted by essence. Therefore the limitation of essence has to be derived from somewhere other than matter or esse, which Aquinas does not do, ergo etc.

* * *

In a comment to one of Faber's recent posts Paradoxicon, following upon the post I've just been talking about, asks "What is your take on Scotus's idea of infinity as a (positive) intrinsic mode vs. Aquinas's conception of infinity as a mere lack of (accidental?) limits? While it is easy to see that Aquinas's arguments for divine infinity in the Summa are formally invalid (as Scotus notes), it is not so easy to understand how Scotus's teaching is different from Aquinas's, regarding the concept of infinity itself. Any thoughts?"

Aquinas frequently gives me the impression that practically all of metaphysics boils down to immateriality and essence/existence. He uses these two concepts so often that in my opinion it's an unhealthy preoccupation, metaphysically speaking, because it frequently causes difficulties which could be otherwise avoided. This bit on proving God's infinity is a good example. It's not entirely fair to act as though this is all he has to say on the matter - the parallel chapter in the Contra gentiles for instance is much longer - but from Scotus' point of view the S.T. argument is pretty useless.

The first thing I would say about Scotus' approach would be to point out that in the Primo principio, a little before the quote that Paradoxicon gave, Scotus establishes God's infinity in a totally different way, without saying anything about intrinsic modes either. Scotus proves that God knows everything knowable earlier on, after showing that God is a perfect intellect. But the number of knowables is infinite, since the number of possibles is infinite and God knows everything of which he can be the cause, i.e. everything other than himself. But if God has actual simultaneous knowledge of infinites, his intellect itself must be infinite, and his intellect is identical with his nature, therefore he is infinite by nature.

So rather than proving merely a lack of a delimiting principle, as St Thomas does, Scotus proves the presence of a positive infinite in God. He has other approaches too, but this one has nothing to do with either immateriality or the essence/existence distinction. Rather only an intensively infinite and eternal being could have actual intuitive knowledge of, say, the entire series of integers at once. Contrast this with St Thomas' discussion of how God knows infinites in S.T. I q. 14 a. 11-12. First he says that God knows singulars, because he knows both the universal (immaterial!) form and the matter that he creates which he can apply the universal forms to. (What about the angels again?!) And since form can be applied to matter in an infinite number of ways, God knows infinites. This is quite different from Scotus, for whom form is singular through itself, not through matter, and so infinitely knowable not because it can be absorbed by matter in an indeterminate number of instances, but because there are an infinite number of distinct individual formal essences. The knowledge of infinites in God is not therefore merely virtual, insofar as God can produce his effects in an infinitely varied way, but actual, insofar as the number of possible producibles as distinctly present to the mind of God as an actually infinite series. I suspect then that for Aquinas God knows all the numbers because there's no multitude of things he cannot produce; whereas for Scotus God has a clear formally distinct intuitive conception of each and every integer all at once. So in S.T. I q 25 a.3 Thomas proves that God has infinite power simply because he has an infinite nature which is not delimited by anything, which is identical with his power; whereas as in the P.P Scotus shows that God's power is such that he could produce at one time an infinity of things, "if only they were able to exist simultaneously" (the inability of finite things to aggregate to infinity is a defect of the things themselves, not their cause), and so his power is intensively infinite.

I note also that in P.P. right after talking about infinity Scotus says "From infinity every type of simplicity is inferred." It is precisely the actual distinct intellection of an infinity of knowables that lets us infer that God must be absolutely simple. If God were not simple, then the distinct number of things he knows would have to aggregate, which could never happen to infinity. An infinite number of knowables cannot be grasped successively or even by instantaneous "grouping" or "collecting" or establishing a "set", but only in a single simple act which grasps each at once in its distinction from all the others. With the formal distinction divine simplicity looks really different for Scotus than it does for Aquinas.

This is pretty brief and there are a lot of deep waters here. Please nobody take this as anything but the merest first stab at the question. It's all I have time for now.

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.