THE ARISTOTELIAN BACKGROUND

At the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that all arts and inquiries, acts and choices, aim at some good. Indeed, they presume an ultimate good. For if they sought no good at all they would not be chosen, and without an ultimate intrinsic good their rationality would collapse. Aristotle’s title for that ultimate aim, a title meant to be uncontroversial, is eudaimonia, loosely translatable as happiness. Its nature is not a given: philosophy has its work cut out for it in clarifying just what this ultimate human goal must be. Some seek happiness in pleasure, wealth, or honor; others scramble for whatever sensation appeals at the moment or blindly pursue domination. Aristotle, however, maintains that (1) eudaimonia is something objective, not mere gratification, euphoria, or complacency; (2) it is not merely a passive state of well-being but an active life of doing well (euprattein); and (3) the virtues are dispositions that promote the good life that we seek. Aristotelian moral virtues such as courage, generosity, and self-control are dispositions, or habits of acting in accordance with a mean discerned by reason. Phronesis, strength in deliberation, is an intellectual virtue, but sophia, the queen of the intellectual virtues, finds our most godlike activity in contemplation. As Aristotle sees it, the virtues point the way to happiness, much as Plato sought the nature of reality through his conception of knowledge.

For medieval philosophers, as for Aristotle, contemplation is typically the consummate human goal, finding its highest object in the divine. Philosophers disagree, however, about the rapport of happiness with an active life. Horrified by the world’s state, some seek withdrawal; others strive for engagement, integrating contemplation and inquiry with moral, social, and political responsibility. Some reserve ultimate felicity to the hereafter, whereas others see windows opening on it in the here and now.

Two texts framed medieval Christian discussions of the idea that God exercises providential care and governance over the created order: the biblical Book of Wisdom and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. In the Book of Wisdom, the term ‘providence’ occurs at 6:17, where Wisdom “presents herself in all providence,” and again at 14:3, which says: “Father, your providence rules because you have provided a way even on the sea and a most solid path among the waves.” These passages provided both warrant and mandate for theologians to investigate how God’s omniscience and omnipotence were manifest in the providential governance of the created order; it was Boethius, however, who set the philosophical parameters for that investigation.

Boethius defines God’s providence as the “unfolding of temporal events as this is present to the vision of the divine mind” (Consolation IV prose 6). He goes on to claim that:

The philosophical problem of describing God arises at the intersection of two different areas of inquiry. The word ‘describing’ makes it clear that the issue is in part a logical one – in the broad medieval sense of ‘logic,’ which includes semantics, the philosophy of language, and even some aspects of the theory of cognition. It is the problem, first, of forming an understanding of some extramental object and, second, of conveying that understanding by means of verbal signs. But the word ‘God’ also indicates that the logical problems involved in description are exacerbated, or perhaps that new problems arise, because of the nature of the extramental object that we are seeking to describe.

Given the enormous ingenuity with which logical problems were debated in the Middle Ages, it is not surprising that the problem of describing God would be worked out in detail – and that many thinkers would lose sight of the specifically theological context in which the problem was ostensibly set. We see here a familiar phenomenon. Once philosophers (even scholastic philosophers) have fully domesticated a problem, discussions of the problem seldom lay bare the practical urgency that alone made the question worth pursuing in the first place; it becomes a technical question, answerable by technical means. Yet, though it is not always in evidence, the practical upshot of the issue is never entirely forgotten, as John Duns Scotus reminds us in his curt dismissal of the view that we can at best say of God what he is not: “We do not have supreme love for negations” (Ordinatio I.3.1.1–2 n. 10).

According to the medieval division of the sciences, grammar is one of the three arts of the trivium, along with logic and rhetoric. In its most theoretical form, however, the development of medieval grammar is closely connected to the development of logic; in contrast, grammar as a didactic discipline, aimed at teaching Latin, is linked to other genres, such as the “poetic arts,” lexicography, and studies of the classics. Our knowledge of theoretical grammar, which is the object of the present study, has increased tremendously over the past twenty-five years as new editions have become available. As this chapter demonstrates, the major contribution of the modistae of the late thirteenth century – the group most closely associated with the development of theoretical grammar – is now understood as part of a broader and more diversified picture, which shows the interplay of grammar with logic, philosophy, and theology.

EARLY TWELFTH CENTURY

Recent studies have investigated the degree of continuity in the linguistic arts between the early and later Middle Ages. John Scottus Eriugena’s recently edited commentary on Priscian shows that sophisticated discussions can be found in the Carolingian period of important issues such as the corporeal or incorporeal nature of an utterance (is it, for example, a substance [the Stoics and Priscian], or a quantity [Aristotle]?) and the meaning of the categorical notions of substance, quality, action, or time (as they occur in the definition of the parts of speech).

As moral agents, people are disposed to act for the sake of what they judge to be morally good. Modern philosophers have often considered such a disposition to be in opposition to another disposition, called “self-interest.” In the Middle Ages, however, moral action was often – or even usually – thought to agree with one’s own genuine best interests. In effect, all medieval thinkers based their theory of action on the fundamentally Aristotelian principle that human beings are rational agents aiming at the fulfillment of their own nature, guided by judgments about what is good for them – a principle that had been generally accepted even in other ancient philosophical schools. In the medieval period, the most philosophically interesting debates concerned different understandings of this principle rather than its validity. Medieval philosophers fundamentally disagreed about what human persons are as moral agents, and thus they also disagreed concerning the nature of self-interest and its relation to morality.

In particular, medieval philosophers recognized that Aristotle’s eudaimonistic principle is philosophically vague in at least two ways. First, the connection between this principle and ethical judgments is in need of an explanation. Does this principle describe the ultimate foundation of morality? Or does it describe individual self-interest as something that is fundamentally distinct from the moral perspective? In other words, is aiming at what is good for oneself the same as aiming at what is good morally, or is there some other (external) ground for moral goodness?

SOURCES FOR THE SCHOLASTIC DEBATE

At least two issues contributed to the extensive discussion of essence and existence by Latin thinkers in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. First, there was a need to explain the metaphysical structure of immaterial entities other than God (angels, within the Christian tradition) in a way that would distinguish them from the absolute simplicity of God, especially for those who rejected the possibility of matter–form composition both for such entities and for human souls (see Chapters 21 and 46). Second, there was a need to account metaphysically for the distinction between God, the uncaused cause who necessarily exists, and all other beings, which depend on something else for their existence.

This famous scholastic dispute over the relationship between essence and existence has its roots in earlier Latin and Arabic discussions. Among Latin sources, Boethius was especially influential. He begins his De hebdomadibus by listing a series of axioms, some of which compare and contrast that-which-is (id quod est) and being (esse). Consider, for instance, Axiom II: “Being and that-which-is are diverse”; Axiom VII: “Every simple entity has its being and that-which-is as one”; and Axiom VIII: “In every composite entity its being and that-which-is are diverse.” With some exceptions, modern interpreters of Boethius do not see in this contrast a real distinction between essence and existence (esse) as two distinct intrinsic principles of being. Rather, according to many of these interpreters, Boethius compares and distinguishes between a concrete entity (that-which-is) and a form in which it shares (esse).

Nowadays philosophers who worry about determinism are usually worrying about determination by physical causes. A prominent question is thus whether physical causes might necessitate my performing a given action, and yet leave me free to choose with respect to that action. But this is not a central question in medieval discussions of freedom, which tend rather to center on God. There are two features of God’s nature that might seem to imply determinism. First, God is the creator of all things. How, then, does his creative act relate to human acts? If he is the real agent of these acts, it would seem that it is God, and not us, who is morally responsible for them. Second, God is omniscient, which seems to mean that God knows in advance what I will do. How, then, can I be free with respect to what I do?

Why were the medievals not particularly worried about physical determinism? In part the explanation, as is so often the case, goes back to Aristotle. Aristotle and philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition make a fundamental distinction between what is necessary, essential, and always the case, and what is possible, accidental, and only sometimes the case. For example, human beings are necessarily, essentially, and always rational, whereas human beings are merely possibly, accidentally, and sometimes bald. Already in the late ancient tradition, most particular events and properties in the physical world were normally consigned to the realm of chance and the accidental.

BACKGROUND AND SOURCES

Most religions and pre-modern philosophies advance some idea of the soul. In ancient Hebrew thought the notion of nephesh refers to living things, but is most often used in connection with human beings, particularly in relation to characteristically human activities. Abstracting from these uses one gets the idea of soul as that which makes a living thing to be alive, and that is present in a body as a result of God’s having breathed this life principle (neshama) into it. Correspondingly, death is associated with the departure of this animating force. So conceived, soul is not as such a uniquely psychological concept, nor is its referent necessarily a personal entity, and there is no sense that it could exist as a separate substance. Later Jewish thought, both that contemporaneous with the first centuries of Christianity, but more so that of the Middle Ages, does speculate about an immaterial part or element of human beings, but as with Christian doctrines of the immortal soul this is the result of encounters with Greek metaphysics.

The principal philosophical sources of medieval speculation about the existence, nature, and possible immortality of the soul derive from the works of Plato and Aristotle, mediated through later Neoplatonic and Islamic interpreters and commentators. In the Meno and the Phaedo, Plato explores the idea of the soul as an immaterial substance that animates a body, but that is itself an independently existing intellectual subject. The latter status raises the possibility of the soul’s survival of its bodily partner’s death, and indeed of its intrinsic immortality (as well as of its possible pre-existence). Plato rehearses a number of arguments that involve the idea that intellectual knowledge is of non-material ‘objects’ and hence is itself an immaterial power, of an immaterial agent.

Near the beginning of the second part of the Summa theologiae, Thomas Aquinas offers a detailed analysis of human action. This analysis presupposes that the human act has an objective, complex, and morally significant structure (see 1a2ae 18.4 ad 3), and that any adequate moral theory will give a central place to this structure. Today, even those most sympathetic to Aquinas’s moral theory are likely to find these presuppositions unconvincing and the details of his analysis bewildering. Yet Aquinas was hardly alone, either in his presuppositions or in the attention he devoted to the analysis of human action. On the contrary, earlier Latin discussions contain a rich and complex debate over the moral and theological significance of the structure of the human act. The terms of this debate are complex and by no means identical to Aquinas’s own. For that very reason it is worth examining in its own right, for its substantive interest and also for its continuing relevance to contemporary moral and legal philosophy. What follows represents an attempt to trace the main lines of this debate, without claiming an exhaustive treatment. Given its continuing importance, Aquinas’s analysis will be given extended attention, but as will be apparent, that analysis is only fully comprehensible in the context of the preceding debate.

ACTION AND INTENTION IN EARLIER LATIN THOUGHT

The late eleventh and early twelfth centuries comprised a period of far-reaching institutional development and reform, both in the church and in civil society. In this context, long-standing questions about the meaning of sin or wrongdoing and the status of problematic actions took on new urgency. Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, theologians and jurists devoted considerable attention to identifying the components of the human act in virtue of which it is sinful or praiseworthy, and drawing out the practical consequences of this analysis.

For Aristotle, the natural world is the world of things subject to change. Accordingly, Aristotle’s natural philosophy essentially consists in a philosophical investigation of change. Aristotle deals with the most fundamental philosophical issues about change in the Physics. Here he determines the intrinsic constituents of a thing that make it possible for it to be subject to change (matter and form), he classifies the types of explanatory factor at work in the natural world (the distinction of the four causes), and in particular he argues for the claim that nature acts for an end (teleological explanation). He also gives a general definition of change, which relates the notion of change to the more basic notions of act and potency, he shows that every change is continuous, and he proves the existence of an eternal motion and an unmoved mover. In addition, he provides a philosophical treatment of the notions of time, place, the void, and the infinite, which are thought to be necessary parts of a complete discussion of change. Because of its extremely rich philosophical content, the Physics was intensely studied by medieval philosophers and became the focal text for the assimilation of Aristotle’s natural philosophy.

The Physics was first made available to the Latin world in the second quarter of the twelfth century, when it was translated into Latin (from the Greek) by James of Venice. It circulated quite slowly, however, and so it was only around the middle of the thirteenth century that the Physics started to be widely studied. This is shown by the high number of extant works devoted specifically to the Physics – that is, commentaries on it – from the 1250s onward.

The epistemology of religious belief, a central topic among medieval philosophers, shows no signs of disappearing from the public’s consciousness or the philosophers’ agenda. The reason why is not hard to find. Large-scale advances in science, rightly heralded as triumphs of reason, have been alleged to have implications for the rationality of religious faith: one need only think of the development of evolutionary biology in the past 150 years and of physical cosmology in the past fifty. Of course, the medieval philosophers knew nothing of evolutionary biology. And although they speculated about one big issue in physical cosmology – whether the world was created or has existed forever – their speculations were shaped not by experimental evidence but by Scripture and Aristotelian science. Nevertheless, it does not follow that medieval debates about faith and reason have been superseded. It may well be that contemporary debates on the relation between faith and reason would benefit from a fresh examination of medieval discussions.

PRELIMINARIES

A few preliminary, terminological remarks are in order, first about reason, then about faith. First, in theological contexts, reason is sometimes contrasted with divine revelation, especially when revelation is restricted in its application to doctrines alleged to be beyond the powers of human reason. There is a more expansive conception of reason according to which reason can discover on its own some items of revelation, but this chapter will exclude discussion of that possibility. Second, reason is sometimes distinguished from understanding. Reason, it is said, is discursive while understanding is intuitive.

The contents of this chapter have been removed for legal reasons.

Kant named the three main sorts of argument for God’s existence “ontological,” “cosmological,” and “teleological.” All three sorts were deployed in the Middle Ages. “Ontological” arguments are deductive and have no empirical premises. These originated with Anselm of Canterbury and flourished in the thirteenth century, but fell into disuse afterward, reemerging only with Descartes. Medieval “cosmological” arguments are also deductive, but have at least one empirical premise. Most medieval cosmological arguments depend heavily on material from Aristotle or John Philoponus; the most original medieval contributions were by al-Fārābī and Avicenna. Cosmological arguments typically first infer the existence of something, and then argue that it is God. Although medieval philosophers had much to say on the second score, for reasons of space this chapter focuses only on their existence arguments. Teleological arguments – arguments from design – were not prominent in medieval philosophical theology and mostly remained at an intuitive level. The Middle Ages’ real contribution to natural theology thus lies with the first two sorts, and so this chapter discusses only these.

ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENTS

Anselm gave the first “ontological” argument in Proslogion 2. The key passage is this:

Medieval thinkers regarded it as a foundational tenet of faith that the world had come to be through divine agency. The three monotheist Scriptures testify to this in clear terms, and each of the attendant theologies also came to regard it as important that God be recognized as creator. But how is God’s creative act to be understood? Is it entirely sui generis, or does it correspond to some recognized category of change, either straightforwardly or by analogy? Are the facts of creation and its salient characteristics susceptible to rational analysis and demonstration, or do they fall outside those phenomena that it is the business of philosophy to investigate? And what might the connection, or lack thereof, tell us about either creation or causation?

After lengthy deliberations, and not without dissent, Christian orthodoxy settled on the world’s having been created ex nihilo in a limited past. At the same time, medieval philosophers also inherited the dominant philosophical view that the sensible world has always existed, a sempiternal beneficiary of an eternal agency. The compatibility of these two positions was considered problematic early on, and gave rise to an extensive debate over the eternity of the world. Because eternity was closely linked with self-sufficiency in the philosophical tradition, the idea that there might be other eternal principles besides God prompted questions about the necessity and contingency of the current world order and the different ways in which causal dependency might be construed.

Some readers may find it surprising to encounter a chapter on “individual autonomy” in a survey of medieval philosophy, especially in connection with political philosophy. After all, an established tradition of historical scholarship insists that the Middle Ages was a period in which hierarchy, interdependence, and communal holism were emphasized to the virtual exclusion of the individual. The recovery of Aristotle’s writings on ethics and politics during the course of the mid-thirteenth century would seem only to reinforce the generally “communitarian” and anti-individualistic orientation commonly ascribed to medieval thinkers. Recently, the image of medieval Europe as hostile to the individual has been reaffirmed by its depiction as a “persecuting society.” Thus, according to the conventional view, the Renaissance and the Reformation constituted the watershed for the appearance of the individual as a moral and political category worthy of philosophical consideration.

Yet medieval political thinkers, both before and after the dissemination of Latin translations of Aristotle’s work, were surprisingly attuned to the standing of the individual and the role of free choice in public affairs. In their emphasis on the centrality of private property and consent to government, as well as their insistence on the ability of individuals to enjoy forms of personal liberty (such as free thought, judgment, and speech), these authors resisted the supposedly hierocratic (even authoritarian) tendencies that scholarship often ascribes to the Middle Ages.

The twelfth century was one of the most important and exciting periods in the history of logic. At the start of the century, the production of elementary glosses on ancient texts gave way to a sophisticated commentary literature in which writers developed and debated their own theories concerning what we would now classify as ontology and philosophical logic. Most famous today are the disputes over the status of universals; the present chapter, however, focuses on the less well-known – but, I believe, more important – work done on theories of meaning, modality, and the relation of logical consequence. Many of the works that have survived from the twelfth century are anonymous, but fortunately at least some of those by Peter Abaelard do bear his name: in particular his survey of logic, the Dialectica (probably written around 1112) and a set of commentaries on the books of the logica vetus known as the Logica “Ingredientibus” (probably written between 1115 and 1120). Abaelard is the outstanding logician of this period and is, indeed, one of the greatest of all logicians. His work in these areas fundamentally shaped later development in logic; what follows is essentially an account of his views and of the problems to which they gave rise.

To grasp the importance and originality of Abaelard’s work, it is first necessary to understand in some detail the character of the semantical and logical theories that Boethius bequeathed to the Middle Ages. These were transmitted in his translations of both Porphyry’s Isagoge and Aristotle’s Categories and De interpretatione, together with his own Introductio ad syllogismos categoricos and De syllogismo categorico (which together paraphrase Prior Analytics I.1–7), his treatises De hypotheticis syllogismis, De differentiis topicis, and De divisione, and his commentaries on the Categories, as well as on the Isagoge and De interpretatione, both of which he commented on twice.

This chapter deals with the basic tenets of ancient philosophical theories of emotions, the reception and transformation of these in the Middle Ages, and some late medieval innovations, concentrating on how emotions were understood as psychological phenomena rather than on an analysis of particular emotions or their role in ethics. Although various theories of the soul influenced the general analysis of emotions, ancient thinkers usually accepted similar descriptions of paradigmatic emotions, such as desire, fear, or anger. This is also typical of later philosophical discussions. In the light of philosophical sources, some emotions look pretty much the same from the days of Plato and Aristotle to our time, while others have changed and still others have become unusual or disappeared (for example, some monastic feelings).

ANCIENT THEORIES

The philosophical analysis of emotions was introduced by Plato and Aristotle, both of whom distinguished between various elements in occurrent emotions as follows. First, the cognitive element is an unpremeditated evaluation that states that something positive or negative is happening, either to the subject or to someone else in a way that is relevant to the subject. Second, the affective element is the pleasant or unpleasant feeling about the content of the evaluation. Third, the dynamic element is the spontaneous behavioral impulse towards a typical action. Fourth, associated with the affective element are bodily reactions which, as distinct from emotional feelings, may occur in other occasions as well.

BASIC ISSUES

From antiquity through the Hellenistic era, all the leading philosophers argued that people acquire virtues naturally, through their own learning and practice. As we are the sole or principal cause of our virtues, so too are we the sole or principal cause of our happiness. The theocentric ethics favored by later Jews, Christians, and Muslims left open to question what insights might be gleaned from these earlier anthropocentric theories. As a result, disputes about the various causal theses of ancient ethics run like a leitmotif through the medieval literature. Are virtues God-given, or can we acquire them just by exercising the natural human capacities of intellect and will? Are virtues sufficient, or even necessary, for obedience to God’s law? Is happiness, whether now or in the afterlife, actually caused by our virtues, or is it a divine reward – perhaps even simply a divine gift?

On the whole, medieval thinkers concentrated less on criticizing earlier views than on developing alternative theories of virtue. In constructing such theories they argued as much with each other as they did with the teachings of ancient philosophers. As it was open to debate how philosophical works should be interpreted, so it was open to debate how Scripture and the “authoritative” works of one’s own religious tradition should be interpreted. Much of what today is orthodox doctrine was still in the making. For instance, even Muslims who agreed that people attain complete happiness only in the afterlife disagreed about how this relates to virtue.