Pet Peeve

Michael pointed me to this discussion over at First Things.  Someone kindly mentioned this blog.  One pet peeve I have with all "these people" (the narrativists) is the use of the term "univocal metaphysics". There really is no such thing.  If one bothered to find out what the word "univocal" means, one would learn it is a property of terms, or concepts.  So when I hear this stupid phrase, I automatically think 'univocal to what?' Oh well. As the eminent Notre Dame historian (that's right, the same department as the eminent Brad Gregory) John van Engen once said in class, "historians aren't conceptually gifted".

PS: Rachel Fulton. Seriously? She is the go-to medievalist for Scotus and univocity? Just look at her CV. She's an expert at intellectual history, prayer, liturgy, and JRR Tolkien. She's not going to be worrying about Scotus' argument from certain and doubtful concepts and whether the response that Scotus tips in is from Henry, or maybe Richard of Conington.

There is a real crisis of authority going on.

Doom and Gloom

Just what was so great about the middle ages or the medieval universities? Not much, if you read the media. The New York Times recently had an article about a medieval manuscript (a shocking event in itself), but the tenor of the piece was that it was written by catholic "rebels", ie the spiritual franciscans inspired by Olivi. All that matters is that they were against that nasty catholic church, so no need to mention anything they actually thought, or what the controversy was actually about. Leiter recently featured a quote from a book that claims the "Islamic" universities are much older than the western ones. But what takes the cake is Victor Davis Hanson's slur that was vomited forth today:

"The lies and academic fraud of Climategate reminded us that it is almost impossible for even disinterested scientists to fathom the complex history of global climate change. But it also — and more importantly — reminded us how Western universities have turned into rigid medieval centers of intolerant orthodoxy. Our new academic monks, in their isolated sanctuaries — cut off by grants, subsidies, tenure, and cadres of obsequious graduate students from the grubby efforts of others to stay alive — have for years breezily issued all sorts of near-religious exegeses and edicts about the public’s ruination of the planet. We lesser folk were supposed to find salvation through installing windmills and junking our incandescent light bulbs under the tutelage of wiser overseers."

So it's not a political thing. The liberal New York Times and Leiter, and conservative Victor Davis Hanson may not agree on much, but they agree that the middle ages were bad bad bad. 150 or years of research on various aspects of the middle ages have apparently had no effect, even on people like Hanson who hold PhD's (of course, he was a classicist, who are notorious for hating medieval latin). All the middle ages are apparently good for is scoring political points, or, if you're catholic, indulging in nostalgia. This hits close to home, naturally, because unlike my co-blogger Michael, my own degree, which is nearing completion, will not be in philosophy but medieval studies. Philosophy is commonly regarded as useless, but I can imagine the fun I will have convincing people that I deserve a job and that the middle ages are worthwhile when even prominent conservatives have such a low opinion of, oh, 1,000 years of human thought and history.

Davide Panagia

Time to reopen an old can of worms, pomo appropriations of "univocity". As generally seems to be the case among this crowd, the underlying interests and motivations are political. To see how much Scotus cared about politics, read Wolter's translations of "Political and Economic Philosophy" and compare it to the size of On the Will and Morality. I've never been sure how to deal with this sort of thing; it's completely false, driven by contemporary concerns about which Scotus knew nothing, completely unfounded in the texts of Scotus himself, a truly bizarre mating of 19th century Thomist historiography of the strict Leonine observance with contemporary liberal protestant theology/philosophy. Any criticism I offer will naturally be construed as "just history" not theology or philosophy. I think I would be content if instead of taking a misunderstood conclusion of Scotus and applying it to all sorts of issues that didn't exist in Scotus' day, they would first try to give an accurate explanation of what Scotus was trying to do, and then, say, and I know this is truly revolutionary, actually discuss the validity of the argument.  Anyway, here is another idiotic example. I'm experimenting with Fr. Z's format here.

From The Poetics of Political Thinking p.58:

"For Duns Scotus, the idea of negation compels the metaphysical question of relation[Actually, scotus' most detailed studies of relation are in Ord. IV where he talks about the eucharist. Apparently, in some of his philosophical commentaries he developes a theory of relation highly dependent on Simplicius]: How does multiplicity relate to Being? What force is it that relates beings to Being?[Not a distinction found in Scotus, unless by Being you mean that entity whose intrinsic mode is infinity, and being an entity whose intrinsic mode is finite] Duns Scotus's answer is that a "univocity of Being" enables an association between disparate entities, but not on the basis of analogy. Rather, Being relates to beings through predication: "God is thought of not only in some concept analogous to that of the creature,[this is a quote from scotus who here admits that he holds the analogy of being] that is, one entirely different from  what is predicated of a creature, but also in some concept univocal to himself and to a creature.[recall that Aquinas' "Analogy" is Aristotle's equivocity] And lest there be any contention about the word 'univocation,' I call that concept univocal that has sufficient unity in itself that to affirm and deny it of the same subject suffices as a contradiction." In contrast to the Judeo-Christian claim that we are all made in God's image,[So Scotus is outside the Judeo-christian tradition? oh, wait he also thinks we are made in the image of God and devotes several questions to it in the same volume of the critical edition as the univocity material is found; so this is slander and misdirection. I get it.] Duns Scotus argues that our similarity to God exits because all beings possess univocity; [How do beings/Beings "possess" univocity? Now it sounds like a concrete thing, not a property of concepts] God, then, is not merely analogous to other beings but is univocal both to himself and to others. The first sentence of the passage teaches us that God is univocal of all creatures[sic. what does this even mean? English please](i.e., present to all creatures [totally out of the blue; divine presence to creation is an entirely separate issue; I thought we are talking about predication]) and "entirely different from what is predicated of a creature." By retaining the principle  of absolute difference between Being and beings,[this "principle" is the commonly accepted distinction between univocal terms and equivocal terms, going back to Aristotle and mediated through Boethius; if you're going to go after Scotus, go after him for not using Aristotle's defintion of what univocal terms are] Duns Scotus makes difference in itself the first quality of Being.[Actually, being/Being can't have qualities because qualities are found in the categories and being is a transcendental, which means it is supracategorical. What being does have is passiones/attributes. Lets talk about them if that's what he means] Associations,[what are associations and where did they come from? Aquinas doesn't talk about them] then, cannot be premised on analogy, since Duns Scotus is not positing a resemblance between God and beings.[wait...i thought the whole point was that he creates a univocalist ontology and makes everything the same?] Rather, he is positing univocity of Being that asserts the radical difference between particulars while relating them to one another." [I get it; Scotus' univocity is really just another form of equivocity...but what does this say about Aquinas' analogy, which is just a weaker form of equivocity than univocity]

There follows a discussion of Deleuze's uses of univocity and his claims that they are rooted in Scotus, though he doesn't use any of the same terms in the same sense, "Scotus" is as much a cipher in Delezue as it is for the Cambridge Phantasists. The following is the summary of what Deleuze is doing:

"The principle of univocity marks both an ontological turn in the conception of difference and a "minor event" in the history of philosophy. By weaving that historical thread from Duns Scotus, thhrough Spinoza, to Nietzsche, Deleuze presents a counterhistory of metaphysics that illuminates the "banality of the negative." Importantly, this historical trajectory is also part and parcel of his overturning of Platonism--to the extent that Plato, in the flash of an instant, was the first to confuse difference with negation by denying simulacra their proper place among philosophical claimants."

This model of the history of philosophy is, I suspect what motivates RO. But why not just criticize Deleuze? It would be far more of a blow to him to show his view of history is bogus, than accept his views on certain things and then try to counteract them by, say, getting rid of every discipline except theology. What would Thomas say...