Research Article
Virtus Sermonis and the Trinity: Marsilius of Inghen and the Semantics of Late Fourteenth-Century Theology
- MAARTEN J. F. M. HOENEN
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- 19 March 2003, pp. 157-171
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The normative use of the Church Fathers and the theologi approbati, who were among the most important auctoritates next to the Scriptures, demonstrates that late-medieval theologians were faithful to tradition. This predilection for tradition was affirmed by, and institutionalized in, the university, where a fixed list of texts was read and commented upon across generations.
The medieval notion of auctoritas and the use of a fixed list of texts is discussed in L. M. de Rijk, La Philosophie au Moyen-Age (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985), pp. 82–105. As to the educational system, see J. Hamesse, ed., Manuels, Programmes de Cours et Techniques d'Enseignement dans les Universités Mediévales (Louvain-la-Neuve: Institut d'Études Médiévales de l'Université Catholique de Louvain, 1994).
The Phenomenological Act of Perscrutatio in the Proemium of St. Bonaventure’s Commentary on the Sentences
- EMMANUEL FALQUE
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- 08 May 2002, pp. 1-22
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As Hans Urs von Balthasar has put it, “nothing is more typical of [St. Bonaventure] than the prologue to the whole commentary on the Sentences.”
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. II: Studies in Theological Style: Clerical Styles, trans. Andrew Louth, Francis McDonagh, and Brian McNeil, C.R.V. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984), p. 264. This remark is the inspiration for the following rereading of Bonaventure’s inaugural lecture. Not only does the Commentary succeed to a remarkable degree in unifying scholasticism and mysticism, but it also contains the seeds of a descriptive theological method that is original in ways that parallel contemporary phenomenological thought, despite the risk of anachronism inherent in such a claim.
Letting Scotus Speak for Himself
- MARY BETH INGHAM
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- 19 March 2003, pp. 173-216
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In “The Unmitigated Scotus,” Thomas Williams calls for another, better reading of the Subtle Doctor: one in which he is able to “speak for himself.”
Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 80. Bd, 1998, p. 162. In this and other articles, Williams criticizes recent Scotist scholarship for its misguided attempt to save Scotus from “the unpalatable position” he actually held, that is, a libertarian voluntarist divine command moral philosophy.Thomas Williams, “How Scotus Separates Morality from Happiness,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 69 (1995): 425–46; Williams, “Reason, Morality, and Voluntarism in Duns Scotus: A Pseudo-Problem Dissolved,” The Modern Schoolman, 74 (1997): 73–94; Williams, “The Libertarian Foundations of Scotus's Moral Philosophy,” The Thomist 62 (1998): 193–215. He presents his position as one that, finally, allows Scotus to speak for himself.
Al-Ghazālī on Possibility and the Critique of Causality
- BLAKE D. DUTTON
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- 08 May 2002, pp. 23-46
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One of the most striking features of speculative theology (kalāam) as it developed within the Ash'arite tradition of Islam is its denial of causal power to creatures. Much like Malebranche in the seventeenth century, the Ash'arites saw this denial as a natural extension of monotheism and were led as a result to embrace an occasionalist account of causality. According to their analysis, causal power is identical with creative power, and since God is the sole and sovereign creator, God is the only causal agent. To assert anything else is to compromise monotheism. This position, of course, was in direct opposition to the prevailing accounts of causality within the philosophical tradition of Islam at the time. The philosophers (falāasifa) had by and large taken over accounts of causality from Aristotle and the Neoplatonists and adapted them in accordance with their own set of concerns. In such accounts, while God stands as the first cause, secondary causation—the causative action of agents other than God—is unambiguously affirmed, even if variously understood. Thus, as they offered a sophisticated account of causal action in direct opposition to the occasionalist thesis, the falāasifa posed something of challenge to the theologians.
Suárez and the Problem of External Sensation
- JAMES B. SOUTH
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- 19 March 2003, pp. 217-240
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To best understand the key problem facing any Aristotelian theory of sensation, one would be wise to turn to the words of Jonathan Lear: The task is to show how some part of the world—ourselves and other animals—can become conscious of the rest of the world. The danger is that we make the account of the transition from world to mind either too material or too spiritual. If, on the one hand, we give a purely material account of, say, the physical change that a certain visual scene (a tree) forms in the eye of the perceiver, we seem to leave consciousness out of the account. It remains unclear how, by such a physical change, one is meant to get out of the nonconscious physical world. On the other hand, if we give a totally spiritual account, it is not clear that we have given an account of a transition, for it is not clear that we have begun in a thoroughly nonconscious world.
Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 108.
Maimonides’ Demonstrations: Principles and Practice
- JOSEF STERN
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- 16 May 2002, pp. 47-84
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It is well known that Maimonides rejects the Kalam argument for the existence of God because it assumes the temporal creation of the world, a premise for which he says there is no “cogent demonstration (burhan qat'i) except among those who do not know the difference between demonstration, dialectics, and sophistic argument.”
Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), I:71:180. All references are to this translation; parenthetic in-text references are to part, chapter, and page. By contrast, he claims to establish belief in the existence of God “through a demonstrative method as to which there is no disagreement in any respect” (I:71:182). Taken at his word, Maimonides’ proofs for the existence of the deity, like Aquinas’s five ways, have traditionally been read as models of medieval natural theology: of the power of human reason to independently establish revealed truth. In recent years, however, the same demonstrations have assumed a second kind of significance. For scholars, like myself, who argue that Maimonides holds severe views about the limitations of human knowledge of divine science and metaphysics, these demonstrations are the strongest conceivable counterevidence.The locus classicus for this view is Shlomo Pines, “The Limitations of Human Knowledge According to Al-Farabi, Ibn Bajja, and Maimonides,” in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, ed. I Twersky, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), I:82–109. See also his “Les Limites de la Métaphysique selon Al-Farabi, ibn Bajja et Maimonide; Sources et Antitheses de ces Doctrines chez Alexandre d’Aphrodise et Chez Themistius,” Miscellanea Mediaevalia 13 (1981): 211–25; “Dieu et L’Etre Selon Maimonide: Exégese d’Exode 3,14 et doctrine connexe,” in Celui qui est: Interprétations juives et chrétiennes d’Exode 3, 14, ed. A. de Libera et E. Zum Brunn (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf [Collection “Patrimoines”], 1986), 15–24; and “The Relation between Maimonides’ Halakhic and non-Halakhic Works,” in Maimonides and Philosophy, ed., S. Pines and Y. Yovel (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987). Pines concludes, on the basis of the limitations of the intellect with respect to knowledge of metaphysics, that Maimonides, like Kant, gives priority to the practical over the theoretical. For arguments drawing different ‘skeptical’ conclusions, see my “Maimonides in the Skeptical Tradition,” ms.; “Maimonides on the Growth of Knowledge and the Limitations of the Intellect,” to appear in Tony Levy, ed., Maimonide: Traditions philosophiques et scientifiques médievales arabe, hébraique, latine; “Logical Syntax as a Key to a Secret of the Guide of the Perplexed,” (in Heb.), Iyyun 38 (1989): 137–66; “Maimonides on Language and the Science of Language,” in Maimonides and the Sciences, ed., H. Levine and R. Cohen (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), pp. 173–226; and The Matter and Form of Maimonides’ Guide (forthcoming). If Maimonides really held that humans cannot apprehend metaphysical truths about the deity, how could he have demonstrated (or even thought he could demonstrate) the existence of God? If he does demonstrate it, then humans evidently do have knowledge of metaphysics. As one distinguished scholar has recently protested, it is nothing less than “perverse” to interpret Maimonides as “meaning that the existence of God is unknowable when he in fact prides himself on having demonstrated the existence of God in four different ways.”Herbert A. Davidson, “Maimonides on Metaphysical Knowledge,” Maimonidean Studies 3 (1992–1993): 49–103, 86. See also Alfred L. Ivry, “The Logical and Scientific Premises of Maimonides’ Thought,” in Perspectives on Jewish Thought and Mysticism, ed. Alfred L. Ivry, Elliot R. Wolfson, and Allan Arkush (Amsterdam: Harwood Publishers, 1998), pp. 63–97, 70.
Suárez's Influence on Descartes's Theory of Eternal Truths
- AMY KAROFSKY
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- 19 March 2003, pp. 241-262
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There is a philosophical problem, what I will call the problem of eternal truths, that can be stated as follows: If an unactualized, possible essence has no being and is, hence, absolutely nothing, then what grounds the eternal and necessary truth of propositions that purport to be about them? If there were no men, what would ground the necessary truth, “Man is a rational animal”? And what grounded the truth of that proposition prior to the creation of the world? (If it was in fact true at that moment?)
Aquinas’s Abstractionism
- HOUSTON SMIT
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- 16 May 2002, pp. 85-118
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According to St. Thomas, the natures of material things are the proper objects of human understanding.
Thomas claims only that the natures of things are the proper objects of the intellect, not that they are its only objects: he does not deny that we have intellective cognition also of the contingent states and situations of particular material things. And he holds that, at least in this life, humans cognize these natures, not through innate species or by perceiving the divine exemplars, but only by abstraction from phantasms (ST Ia, 84.7, 85.1).This claim applies to the exercising of concepts already acquired, as well as their initial acquisition (ST Ia 84.7). Here and throughout, I use “cognition” to translate “cognitio.” As Scott MacDonald (“Theory of Knowledge” in Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed., N. Kretzmann and E. Stump [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], p. 162) points out, translating “cognitio” with “knowledge” is misleading, given that cognitiones can, on Thomas’s account, be false (see, for example, ST Ia 17.3). I discuss Aquinas’s conception of cognition in section I.1. More precisely, the human intellect’s active component, the agent intellect, produces cognition of the natures of material things by abstracting intelligible forms from phantasms and informing them on its passive component, the possible intellect, to actualize the latter’s potency to understand.This division of the intellect into an active and a passive component originates in Aristotle’s cryptic remark that in the soul “there is a mind for becoming all things” and “a mind for producing all things” (DA III 5, 430a10). This passage has been subject to myriad interpretations. Aristotle’s Arabic commentators read him as saying that (one or both) of these intellects are single and separate from individual human souls. In opposition to these interpretations, Aquinas holds that the agent and possible intellects are both immanent powers of each individual soul. Since these interpretations enjoyed considerable popularity in Aquinas’s day, we often find him developing his account of the human intellect in explicit opposition to them (cf. OUIAA). The aim of the present piece is to clarify Thomas’s account of this intellective abstraction, and thereby the precise force of the conceptual empiricism it asserts.Important recent work by several scholars has advanced our understanding of many central aspects of Aquinas’s philosophy of mind and epistemology, including his account of intellective abstraction. See Eleonore Stump, “Aquinas on the Foundations of Knowledge,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy (Supplementary Volume) 17 (1992); “Aquinas’s Account of the Mechanisms of Intellective Cognition,” Revenue Internationale de Philosophie 52 (1998): 287–307; “Aquinas on Sensory Cognition,” in Medieval Analyses in Language and Cognition, eds. Sten Ebbesen and Russell L. Friedman, volume 77 in the series Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, Historisk-Filosofiske Meddelelser (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1999), pp. 377–395. Norman Kretzmann, “Infallibility, Error, and Ignorance,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (1992); Kretzmann, “Philosophy of Mind,” in Cambridge Companion to Aquinas; Robert Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Scott MacDonald (“Theory of Knowledge,” in Cambridge Companion to Aquinas).Many of these discussions share a salutary focus on Aquinas’s claims regarding the reliability of our faculties, so that their treatments of intellective abstraction tend to center on his prima faciae wildly implausible claim to its infallibility: “The proper object of intellect is the quiddity of a thing, and this is why intellect is not fallible regarding the quiddity of a thing, speaking of it just as such” (ST Ia 85.6). Kretzmann provides an interesting and detailed treatment of this claim. Drawing on a range of texts, he argues that the intellect’s apprehension of the quiddity of a thing is such that one acquires an initial, crude concept of that thing, and that this apprehension must be distinguished from the intellect’s act of compounding, in judgments, the aspects of things so apprehended: it is only through a fallible, and extended process of making such judgments that we arrive at more adequate concepts of things (see the final section of “Infallibility, Error, and Ignorance”). MacDonald also makes insightful, and complementary, observations along similar lines (pp. 183–84). However, though helpful, these points do not suffice to explain, let alone render defensible, Thomas’s claim of infallibility: why can’t some of our acts of intellective abstraction yield false cognitions (however rudimentary), in the sense Thomas specifies?; in other words; why can’t the agent intellect sometimes produce in the possible intellect forms which do not correspond to the forms that actually inhere, or even could inhere, in material things? I think that Stump is right to take this optimism to be one striking instance of Thomas’s general epistemic optimism rooted in his conviction that God designed our cognitive faculties (Stump, “Foundations of Knowledge,” pp. 145–48).The interpretation of his intellective abstraction provided here complements Stump’s insight. For it, in effect, elaborates how Aquinas’s theistic metaphysics grounds his epistemic optimism about the first operation of our intellect. In particular, it explains how the agent intellect, as the human participating likeness in the divine light of understanding, has the active potency to order phantasms in such a way that it can produce in the possible intellect intelligible species which are determinate likenesses of the particular material things of which we have experience (cf. Section III iv, below). Examining his distinction between sensible and intellectual cognition, and his account of the way the former, in phantasms, supplies the data for intellective abstraction, will lead us to reassess the nature of Thomas’s antinativism—arguably the most important historical and philosophical legacy of his cognitive psychology.
Divine Needs, Divine Illusions: Preliminary Remarks Toward a Comparative Study of Meister Eckhart and Ibn Al'Arabi
- IAN ALMOND
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- 19 March 2003, pp. 263-282
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A surprising number of Western studies or translations of the Sufi thinker and mystic Ibn Al'Arabi (1165–1240) make some kind of reference to the German preacher Meister Eckhart (1260–1327). The strength and conviction behind such references vary—while some simply mention Eckhart in passing, others (such as R. W. Austin) speak of “striking resemblances,” while Richard Netton, in his 1989 work Allah Transcendent, goes so far as to call Ibn ‘Arabi “the Meister Eckhart of the Islamic Tradition.”
Fusus al-Hikem [“The Bezels of Wisdom”], trans. Ralph Austin (New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1980), p. 16. The Arabic edition used is A. E. Affifi's edition (Beirut: Dar al-kutub al-'Arabi, 1946). All page numbers to original are in bold. Ian Richard Netton, Allah Transcendent: Studies in the Structure and Semiotics of Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Cosmology (Routledge, 1989) p. 293.
Richard Rufus’s De anima Commentary: The Earliest Known, Surviving, Western De anima Commentary
- REGA WOOD
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- 16 May 2002, pp. 119-156
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Richard Rufus of Cornwall was educated as a philosopher at Paris where he was a master of arts.
Thomas Eccleston, De adventu Fratrum minorum in Angliam c. 6 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1951), p. 30. In 1238, after lecturing on Aristotle’s libri naturales, Rufus became a Franciscan and moved to Oxford to study theology, becoming the Franciscan master of theology in about 1256 and probably dying not long after 1259.A. Little, “The Franciscan School at Oxford in the Thirteenth Century,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 19 (1926): 842–45. Wills and Inventories, Surtees Society Publications 2 (London: J.B. Nichols, 1835), pp. 10–11. Cf. A. Little, The Grey Friars in Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), p. 143.