Late Medieval Philosophy
Duns Scotus
On the map of will and intellect, there are two major terms that have been developed, voluntarism and intellectualism. The one stresses the primacy of will and the other stresses the primacy of intellect. The question is when one chooses to do something, is that action a result of intellect or will-free from intellectual necessity. Duns Scotus read Aquinas as an intellectualist, in the sense that God acts in accordance with eternal Forms so that God’s act of creation was not in that sense free. In regards of the human nature, moral action is again guided by the intellect, and consequently one is not free from the moral causes. This compromises the sovereignty of God, and the responsibility of humans.
How does this all come together? If we go back to the overall shape of the philosophical view, mainly they emphasis on a Hierarchy of being, where each degree of being in goodness in the hierarchy is in accordance with the essential forms of things. The whole hierarchy of being is something that represents ontological necessity. It’s a hierarchy of being which can’t be otherwise. Everything has its appropriate place according to the Forms. That kind of the universe is what the problem is.
Unicity of Being
Scotus sees the problem and tries to modify the picture. He tries to affirm what he calls unicity of being, rather than analogy of being. That is to say, the word being is such he prefers to what is, not to degrees of something and degrees of quality. In that sense, being has one and only one meaning, rather than a range of analogical meaning. In this way, he is breaking the necessity that things being arranged in the particular hierarchy in the way they are, they are arranged according to the order of goodness, not according to the order of degree of being. God could have made other creations arranged differently, the creation is contingent in its being and in its order of the way God chose. There is one Corollary of the unicity of being, namely that God knows things not through their Forms as archetypes in his mind which he can contemplate, but directly as kinds of beings as they are.
The direct knowledge of particular beings is significant because there is a direct knowledge of things outside of the divine mind, there must be a kind of mental intentionality. In Gods knowing, God engages an act of intentionality, an act of external reference of mentally referring to something external to the mind.
Part of development of Anti-Realism in modern times has been due to the fact that knowledge was understood as a byproduct of behavioral stimuli. Sense stimuli provoke the change of the state of consciousness, which is a byproduct of sense stimuli, the mind being a passive recipient of such things of consciousness. The other part is due to the subjectivity involved in consciousness. Either way there is problem that how do we know that we know is real. So if it could be argued that there is a direct awareness of the reality by virtue of the mental act that’s able to transcend the limitations of consciousness, then the affirmation of the knowledge of reality becomes possible.
Individualism
Second question is how we account for individuality. The tendency in the past is individuality is the privation of Forms, and since there are various privation of Forms, there are various individuals lacking in their fullness of nature. But that gives no positive value to individuality. So the Aristotelean tradition becomes attractive with its notion of matter individualist, by virtue of having a space time location, the Form is individualized by accidence of that material existence. Aquinas want to give positive value to matter because it is something that God created. Individuality is by act of God drawing out particular potencies of the matter. What Scotus proposes is that whereas the Form give quidditas of a thing, on the other hand, the individual of the things, is provided by a third Form, other than matter and Form, a principle he called Haecceitas(this-ness). In that sense the distinction is simply Form rather than material.
Will & Intellect
In the case of Aristotelian logic, Aristotle has developed syllogism. The big problem we had is establish the first principles. According to Aristotle you can have assured knowledge by means of the intuitive abstraction. The distinctions of species may not be always that clear, that is we will have some probability, so the syllogism argument will only lead to various degrees of probability. Then the act of believing or judging something to be morally good or bad takes an act of will rather than intellect. The implications flow from logic into epistemology.
The more far reaching implication comes in ethics. If the creation is contingent in the will of God, rather than logically necessary as it is, an act is going to have an effect on natural law ethics. The natural law ethic is saying by virtue of the essential nature of things as they are in necessity by virtue of Form, there is a tendency which can be read from nature of things indicating the natural moral law.
The first three commandments talks about the relationship with God which is unchanging. The last seven commandments are about relationship with created being, in changing situations involving changing particular beings. So it’s conceivable that those commandment might change.
Our ethic depends on divine command. It doesn’t depend on the nature of things because it is not necessary. If both natural law and divine command are both silent then we should appeal to the “right reason”.
William of Ockham
Terminism
Ockham in his rejection of the real universals, develops a kind of nominalist position. It’s called terminism to distinguish between the nominalism of Roscelin, who maintained that only words had universal reference and there are no real universal concept.
In Terminism, the term stands for a whole variety of individuals. How can one word have universal reference? There are two views, the first is that the term has universal reference, it brings with it a particular mental image, which is our mental picture indiscriminately of whole class of opinions. It implies that if a term refers to an image of a particular idea, then our knowledge of these particulars is indirect by means the ideas. The second view avoids this playing around with mental ideas, we have direct awareness of individuals. In that sense, the term refers to the mental act of the referring. Because the mental act has external reference consequently a term is used to refer or point mentally. As a terminist, he rejects all universals.
Distinctions
| Ante Ren(Prior Particular) | In Ren(In Particular) | Post Ren(After Particular) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Divine Universal Exemplars | Rene Forms in Particulars | Universal Exemplars held in Abstraction from Particular Images | |
| Realism | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Conceptualism | Yes | No | Yes |
| Nominalism | No | No | No |
| Ockham’s Terminism | No, God’s ideas are ideas of particulars | No | Universal Term, 1. Term as an idea 2. Mental act whereby one refers |
What Ockham has in mind is a conception of intention akin to that which Scotus develops, the act knowing is voluntary, it takes an act of will to think about something. The primary intention of knowing is reference to particular object, secondary intention is the term. Ockham is moving into a pure empiricism, which is saying we can only deal with particulars that we experienced. Second, he is breaking with the Medieval world view with its teleology, it’s view on formal and final causes, and is left with mechanistic view. He is skeptical about universal ideas.
Transition from Medieval to Modern Philosophy
What we find running through is a variety of world view traditions. For example, philosophical naturalism, idealism as a Neo-Platonic traditions, theism. The other variable in the course of history, is changing conceptual models drawn from the science of the day. What we have been tracing thus far is the way in which the Greek science represented by the Platonic Pythagorean and the Aristotelian sciences. How the Greek science contributed to the shaping of the philosophical work in all the traditions. Now that kind of arrangement is breaking down, that’s one of the evolutionary things about Ockham. Because of the rejection of realistic theory of Forms and the ongoing scientific revolution.
Revolution is going on first philosophically in terms of the internal disruption of the scholastic philosophy represented Ockham, bare bones of the beginning of empirical world leading mechanistic science. In addition, there is scientific revolution. The basic idea is matter in motion, to talk about it, there are two concept, one is the concept of absolute space, within which matter can move. And also time, in which change and motion occurs. There are Matter, forces produce motion, absolute space, absolute time. However, we should not make a jump and say the new science is purely empirical.
Two Philosophical Movement
What we are going to be tracing is two different scientific and philosophical movement in modern times. One of which is the empirical tradition and the other the rationalistic tradition. Empirical tradition begins with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkley and David Hume. It is Bacon who first introduces inductive methods. This is sometimes called British Empiricist. For rationalism, you have Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, and this is called continental rationalism. An attempt arises to bring the two together in curious way by Immanuel Kant. So in 19th century you get very different pictures. You get German idealism in people like Hegel and Positivism in people like John Stuart Mill. Instead of philosophy being guided by theology, what’s going to happen in 17th to 18th century is that it’s going to be guided by science. So the relationship between revelation reason breaks down and what you have instead is a conception of reason that’s defined in terms of the scientific knowledge and the ideal of scientific knowledge becomes the ideal of modern philosophy.
Influences on Theology
During Renaissance, there is not only a change of world views, but it’s a crisis on the whole notion of the rationality and knowledge and skepticism is a natural possibility of that juncture. Concurrent with the Renaissance, you have the Protestant Reformation. The most fascinating is Martin Luther. He is educated by nominalist of Ockhamist persuasion, he also studied Aristotle. The particular difficulty he had with Aristotle was the theory of universals, because he was a nominalist. He shared Ockham’s jealousy for the sovereignty of God, voluntarism. He was concerned about the individual before God. He also disagrees with Ockham over the matter of free will. Ockham was accused of being Pelagian in his theology, which emphasizes the free will to the extent to deny any original sin that holds us in bondage and maintain that we are perfectly free to obey God simply by virtue of the influence of example of Christ in his life. Ockham suggested, out of the medieval emphasis on all creation imitating God, that loving God is requisite for salvation, but loving God is a virtue, a virtue is a habit, a habit can be formed by living under the rule of reason, if that’s the case, then reason is necessary for love, which is necessary for salvation. But God’s grace is given to us freely, and reason has nothing to do with salvation. So it was over the question of “salvation by grace alone, justification by faith alone”, that Luther became so critical of the Ockhamists. John Calvin has written an early work on Roman Seneca in the Stoic tradition. Luther sees the natural law in relation to the right reason like Ockham, whereas Calvin sees natural law as invariable and unchanging like the Stoics. Because Stoics has a metaphysical basis for the moral order.
Skepticism
There is a thesis by Richard Popkin about impact of Reformation on philosophy in his book “The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes”, he argues for that the epistemological vacuum was not the vacuum left by the breakdown of the medieval synthesis, it was a breakdown was left also by the loss of authoritative interpreter in the church authority. The Protestant Reformation, in its insistence on scripture alone having authority rejected the authority of church even in interpreting scripture or in speaking on things which the scripture does not speak. So there was a development of the uncertainty of how we know, there was a fear of intellectual anarchy with the ideas of each believers interpreted the scripture for himself and therefore the loss of any clear understanding or knowledge. That is what encourage the rise of the Skepticism, which is represented by a French philosopher Montaigne. Evident in the Descartes’ philosophy, who decides to begin by posing the skeptical position. There is nothing we could know without doubt and he sets himself the task of arguing his way out of skepticism. The radical methodological change that came in philosophy with Descartes were instead of starting with what you believe already, start with nothing at all and work a way out of that.
Ways out of Epistemological Vacuum
And what is it that steps into the epistemological vacuum to save the day, that’s the interesting thing. Francis Bacon talks of certain Idols about which he is skeptical, they include traditional philosophies passed down, naive observations, popular viewpoints, he is posing the very kind of problem which skepticism is concerned with, how are we going to know for sure. What Bacon does is to propose methods for empirical inductive learning and he envisioned a magnificent Utopian society built on the empirical mechanistic sciences of efficient causes. Meantime, Descartes begins his meditations by mapping out the skeptical issue, and proceeding from there. Start with basic axioms and then proofs. You have two alternative methods proposed to avoid skepticism. The method of empirical science, and the method of mathematics. What is the way of knowing then that replaces medieval insight drawn from theology to guide the philosophical mind? What is the rule of reason going to be in the enlightenment? The rules of scientific methods and knowledge. That is what produced the scientific mentality 19th and 20th century and the scientific naturalism of our day.