William of Ockham, the most prestigious philosopher of the fourteenth century, was a late Scholastic thinker who is regarded as the founder of Nominalism -- the school of thought that denies that universals have any reality apart from the individual things signified by the universal or general term. Ockham's Summa Logicae was intended as a basic text in philosophy, but its originality and scope encompass his whole system of philosophy. Yet the paucity of English translations and the structural (...) complexity of the Latin have made the Summa, until now, almost completely inaccessible. Here Michael Loux has translated the first part of the Summa, one of the most original and influential medieval texts in logic. (shrink)

This volume is an introduction to the philosophy of William of Ockham. After a brief account of his life and works, it presents his philosophical ideas under the headings of logic, epistemology, metaphysics, rational theology, philosophy of nature, psychology, ethics, and politics. The work concludes with a bibliography on Ockham and Ockhamism from 1950 to 1970, supplementing that of V. Heynck from 1919 to 1949. This is a well-informed presentation of Ockham’s philosophical ideas. Covering the whole range (...) of his philosophy, it does not treat any part of it in depth; but, as Fr. Bettoni says in his introduction, it offers a new global perspective on Ockham’s thought. There are frequent citations from Ockham’s writings in the notes, indicating the author’s close reading of Ockham’s works. The author is well aware that Ockham was "a philosopher who never ceases to be a theologian". But he does not convey to his reader the fact that Ockham’s interests, like those of Aquinas and Scotus, were primarily theological and not philosophical; that Ockham developed a logic and philosophy in support of a theology. The title of the work "Guglielmo di Ockham" suggests that the Ockham presented in it—Ockham the philosopher, not Ockham the theologian—was the "essential" Ockham.—A. A. M. (shrink)

This monumental work by a perceptive medieval scholar is undoubtedly the most comprehensive work in any modern language of the overall system of Ockham. Its three parts deal respectively with the cognitive order, the theological order, and the created order. Leff credits the more than 30 years of research by such Ockham scholars as Hochstetter, Vignaux, Moody, Baudry, Boehner, etc., with correcting his own earlier misconception—shared by so many historians of philosophy and theology—of Ockham as the one (...) who destroyed scholasticism and upset the fine balance of faith and reason by his ruthless logic, religious insensitivity, and skepticism. Such misconceptions stem from viewing Ockham either through the eyes of his predecessors, such as Aquinas or Scotus, or in the light of "the Ockhamism" of those who claimed to be his followers. In the present book, the author eschews this type of "historical approach." As he puts it, "I have sought to see his thought as a whole, in its own terms, not in pedigrees or... subsequent effects." Although much of Ockham’s writing still await critical editing, Leff sees a remarkable unity in all his works. "They are shaped by the same principles which recur throughout Ockham’s writings.... Whatever the modifications still to come as his works are properly edited, it is inconceivable that they will alter the configuration of Ockham’s thought. It is founded upon the discrepancy between the conceptual and the ontological expressed in the contrast between the individual nature of all being and the universal nature of our concepts. Instead of assuming or attempting to establish a direct rapport between them, Ockham was the first thinker systematically to explore their difference whilst accepting their interdependence." It is precisely because of this interdependence that Ockham was a "conceptualistic realist," to use Boehner’s description. Ockham was "safeguarding concepts from the status of merely mental constructs." He did not deny them epistemological validity as the nominalists did. On the other hand the varying degrees of "realism"—other than conceptualistic—"allowed no means of distinguishing logically between the mental and the real.... The distinction between concepts and what they represented then vanishes, and with it the power of differentiating true from false propositions." Ockham was genuinely concerned with meaning and evidence, the two key words that Leff believes best characterize his outlook. Leff’s professed aim is to show that "Ockham was not a logician devaluing theology or metaphysics; he was no less a philosopher and theologian than his predecessors. He accepted the same framework of knowledge and belief. The difference was that he was concerned with their meaning and evidence to the exclusion of treating their concepts as metaphysical bricks from which to build systems." Howsoever much Leff may have succeeded in achieving this goal or how many of his interpretations of specific topics may need some modification, the fact that he has followed Ockham’s thinking and argument step by step—often in what seems to be little more than an English paraphrase of the Latin text—makes his own detailed analysis a useful instrument for anyone seriously interested in Ockham’s thought.—A.B.W. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

Ockham Explained is an important and much-needed resource on William of Ockham, one of the most important philosophers of the Middle Ages. His eventful and controversial life was marked by sharp career moves and academic and ecclesiastical battles. At 28, Ockham was a conservative English theologian focused obsessively on the nature of language, but by 40, he had transformed into a fugitive friar, accused of heresy, and finally protected by the German emperor as he composed incendiary treatises (...) calling for strong limits on papal authority. This book provides a thorough grounding in Ockham’s life and his many contributions to philosophy. It begins with an overview of the philosopher's youth and the Aristotelian philosophy he studied as a boy. Subsequent chapters cover his ideas on language and logic; his metaphysics and vaunted "razor," as well as his opponents’ "anti-razor" theories; his invention of the church-state separation; and much more. The concluding chapter sums up Ockham's compelling philosophical personality and explains his modern appeal. (shrink)

This article focuses on one aspect of the late mediaeval debate over divine power, as it was discussed by Oxford philosophers Walter Chatton (d. 1343) and William Ockham (d. 1347). Chatton and Ockham would have agreed, for example, that God is ultimately responsible for the existence of the works of Pablo Picasso, but they would not agree over wheher it violates God's omnipotence to say that he cannot make something that Picasso made, for example, the painting Guernica, without (...) using Picasso himself as an intermediate cause. The context of their dispute was a larger debate regarding the ontological status of relations. This article (1) explains how these two issues, omnipotence and relations, became so interestingly tangled together, (2) tries to see which of the two men mentioned above got the better of their exchange, and finally (3) draws out some important consequences for fourteenth-century discussions of causality, occasionalism, and omnipotence. (shrink)

Both in his time, and still now, the name of Descartes has been linked with Pelagianism. Upon close investigation, however, the allegations of Pelagianism and the evidence for them offer very slim pickings. Whether Descartes was a Pelagian is a theological question; the argument here will be that a consideration of Descartes’s claims cited as Pelagian nonetheless promises a better philosophical understanding of his views on the will and other, related matters. After an introduction to Pelagianism , the (...) most prominent source nowadays for its connection with Descartes is seen to be Arnauld, the master critic of the period, who as a Jansenist was especially sensitive to any sign of Pelagianism . Historically, however, the more important source was the Dutch theologian Revius, whose allegation of it against Descartes ignited a long and widespread controversy . Just as Pelagianism might be seen as a “topos in which the Dutch anti-Cartesian literature was concentrated,”[i] so a topos for the Pelagian controversy itself might be the biblical text alluded to by Descartes in the fourth Meditation, according to which man is created in the image and likeness of God, most so, according to Descartes, with respect to the will . Another way to frame the issue, of particular philosophical interest, then, is the infinity of the Cartesian will, explored more recently by Grimaldi . Another recent publication, by Scribano, sets out its origins in a way that shows how complex the Dutch debate really was both in terms of partisanship and philosophical relevance . The issues raised by the connection of Descartes to Pelagianism tend to be orthogonal, breeding confusion; so, at the end below, a brief catalogue of the theological views relevant to Descartes’s claims will be given, based on the results of this investigation . [i] Scribano, Maria Emanuele, Da Descartes a Spinoza : Percorsi della teologia razionale nel Seicento p. 16. (shrink)

Medieval scholars will welcome these two latest volumes in the splendid critical edition of the nonpolitical works of William of Ockham by the Franciscan Institute of St. Bonaventure University. The first completes the set of Ockham’s major logical works that began with the publication of his monumental summa logicae in 1974 and was followed in 1978 by the second volume in the philosophical series, containing the commentaries on Porphyry and Aristotle’s Praedicamenta and Perihermenias, together with the famous tract (...) on predestination and God’s knowledge of future contingents. Known as the Expositio aurea super artem veterem, this second collection was still available in modern photo-reprints of earlier editions, but the Expositio super libros elenchorum, unlike the popular Summa logicae, was never printed before and this last of Ockham’s commentaries on Aristotle’s logical Organon appears here for the first time in other than manuscript form. Though less important than the other commentaries Ockham did on Aristotle at the Franciscan study house in London during the interim between his completion of the lectures on the Sentences and his summons to the papal court at Avignon in 1324, this work, which antedates his commentaries on the Physics, is not without interest. It illustrates, for instance, how Ockham understood "science" and the subject thereof, to say nothing of the light it throws on how he interpreted the various classical fallacies listed by Aristotle to which he continually refers throughout his other writings. Like the other volumes of this edition, this also contains an excellent analytic index that might well serve as a model for improving other critical editions of medieval works as research tools. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Ockham’s seemingly pessimistic epistemological assessments of what we can know about the human soul and its relation to the body reflect a sound appreciation of what is involved in the theoretical development of philosophy and natural science. In order to make my argument, I first undermine the idea that demonstration was a norm that scholastic disputation regularly expected to achieve; and second, I examine Ockham’s treatment of three major topics in psychology.

William of Ockham was a medieval English philosopher and theologian. In 1328 Ockham turned away from 'pure' philosophy and theology to polemic. From that year until the end of his life he worked to overthrow what he saw as the tyranny of Pope John XXII and of his successors Popes Benedict XII and Clement VI. This campaign led him into questions of ecclesiology and political philosophy. The Dialogus purports to be a transcript made by a mature student of (...) lengthy discussions between himself and a university master about the various opinions of the learned on the matters disputed between John XXII and the dissident Franciscans. (shrink)

Guillermo de Ockham vivió profundamente la espiritualidad franciscana: humildad, pobreza y convivencia social . Al mismo tiempo, Ockham defendió la idea de que la humildad intelectual no impide construir una racionalidad que ayude a transformar religiosamente el mundo. El autor de este artículo defiende la unidad del pensamiento filosófico de Ockham, incluido el periodo posterior a los sucesos de Aviñón.William of Ockham was a firm bilever in Franciscan sprituality: humility, poverty and social harmony. At the same (...) time, Ockham defended the idea that intellectual humility did not impede the construction of a rationality that would help in the religious transformation of society. The author of this paper defends the unity of Ockham's philosophical thoughts, long after the events in Avignon. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Ockham’s seemingly pessimistic epistemological assessments of what we can know about the human soul and its relation to the body reflect a sound appreciation of what is involved in the theoretical development of philosophy and natural science. In order to make my argument, I first undermine the idea that demonstration was a norm that scholastic disputation regularly expected to achieve; and second, I examine Ockham’s treatment of three major topics in psychology (thus (...) illustrating how alternative intellectual standards were in play in scholastic disputation). (shrink)

The Franciscan William of Ockham was an English medieval philosopher, theologian, and political theorist. Along with Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, he is regarded as one of the three main figures in medieval philosophy after around 1150. Ockham is important not only in the history of philosophy and theology, but also in the development of early modern science and of modern notions of property rights and church-state relations. This volume offers a full discussion of all significant aspects of (...) Ockham's thought: logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics and natural philosophy, epistemology, ethics, action theory, political thought and theology. It is the first study of Ockham in any language to make full use of the new critical editions of his works, and to consider recent discoveries concerning his life, education, and influences. (shrink)

The recent revival of scientific interest in medieval texts is happily removing the long neglect of the scientific works of William Ockham. While a new edition of his political writings is being prepared in England, the late Father Boehner has initiated a school of study of his philosophical and theological works in New York. As the basic instrument to Ockham’s philosophical evaluation he insisted upon the understanding of Ockham’s systematic re-organization of Aristotelian logic, with some extraordinary anticipations (...) of modern mathematical logic, which he rigorously applied to solve his problems. Lack of appreciation of this logical power exposes us to misjudge, and possibly to charge him with scepticism, since Ockham drew a firm line between the evident presence and absence of proof in the strict sense. Establishing the text of the capital work, Summa Logicae occupied the last twenty years of Fr. Boehner’s life. The present accurate volume carries forward the edition to the second, and the first section of the third part. It expounds the logic of proposition and syllogism and is particularly rich on modal logic. It was composed, according to the editor’s final judgment at Avignon between 1324 and 1327. (shrink)

The recent revival of scientific interest in medieval texts is happily removing the long neglect of the scientific works of William Ockham. While a new edition of his political writings is being prepared in England, the late Father Boehner has initiated a school of study of his philosophical and theological works in New York. As the basic instrument to Ockham’s philosophical evaluation he insisted upon the understanding of Ockham’s systematic re-organization of Aristotelian logic, with some extraordinary anticipations (...) of modern mathematical logic, which he rigorously applied to solve his problems. Lack of appreciation of this logical power exposes us to misjudge, and possibly to charge him with scepticism, since Ockham drew a firm line between the evident presence and absence of proof in the strict sense. Establishing the text of the capital work, Summa Logicae occupied the last twenty years of Fr. Boehner’s life. The present accurate volume carries forward the edition to the second, and the first section of the third part. It expounds the logic of proposition and syllogism and is particularly rich on modal logic. It was composed, according to the editor’s final judgment at Avignon between 1324 and 1327. (shrink)

The Franciscan William of Ockham (c.1285-c.1347) was the greatest theologian and philosopher of the first half of the fourteenth century. Spurred on by the activities of a papacy which he saw as destroying the very foundations of his Order, he devoted the last part of his life to examining the extent of papal power over Christians and its relationship to the secular government of people. On the Power of Emperors and Popes (1347) is his last work. Short, passionate and (...) lucid, it represents a distillation of his thought on these questions and forms an excellent and accessible introduction to his political thought as a whole. The extensive new annotations to the text bring to light the range of sources on which Ockham drew, while the new introduction places the work in its historical context and relates it to other works of medieval Franciscan political discourse. Translated here into English for the first time, the work will be of interest to all students and researchers in the field of medieval political thought. --the first English translation of Ockham's classic work, plus extensive new introduction, textual annotation, and bibliography --modern editorial apparatus connects the work with the whole body of Ockham's political thought --the new annotation provides historical and intellectual context and translations of Ockham's source references. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders Ockham's critique of the species theory of cognition. As Ockham understands this theory, it says that the direct objects of cognition are mental representations, or species. According to many commentators, one of Ockham's main objections to this theory was that, if the direct objects of cognition are species rather than external objects, we will never be able to establish whether or not a given species is a veridical representation of the world. In this paper (...) I argue that this line of interpretation sits uneasily with Ockham's epistemology, and offer a new interpretation of Ockham's critique of species. (shrink)

This article identifies the context of Augustine's theology of grace. His disappointing experiences as a priest and young bishop impacted his theological notions of gratia, especially as they would mature during the Pelagian crisis. Using Cyprian as an authority, Augustine argued against the Donatist idea of grace solely through membership in the 'pure' church and sacramental grace only via ministers free from ecclesial-sin. Instead, Augustine argued that all grace is solely through God and that all humanity and the earthly (...) Church was a mixed body of the fallen and blessed and in need of divine grace. (shrink)

William Ockham joins the general view that in its natural capacities, the intellectual soul of Christ is nobler than any other human being’s soul, but he does not think that Christ is omniscient or omnipotent in his human nature. Despite this, Ockham genuinely believes that Christ did not sin during his earthly life. He did not have any intrinsically sinful acts which are acts of the will, nor even acts that can be extrinsically sinful, such as acts of (...) the sensory appetite like the desire to fornicate. Furthermore, Christ did not have the tinder of sin which inclines ordinary human beings to commit sinful acts. Christ had, instead, a kind of inner rebellion against reason and will. His sensory acts, such as feeling hungry, thirsty, and tired were not always in accordance with his reason and will. As viator, Christ had the greatest possible amount of delight. Since God miraculously prevented the sadness-excluding effect of beatitude and delight in his soul, there was at the same time sadness in him. In hea... (shrink)

William of Ockham (d. 1347) was among the most influential and the most notorious thinkers of the late Middle Ages. In the twenty-seven questions translated in this volume, most never before published in English, he considers a host of theological and philosophical issues, including the nature of virtue and vice, the relationship between the intellect and the will, the scope of human freedom, the possibility of God's creating a better world, the role of love and hatred in practical reasoning, (...) whether God could command someone to do wrong, and more. In answering these questions, Ockham critically engages with the ethical thought of such predecessors as Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus. Students and scholars of both philosophy and historical theology will appreciate the accessible translations and ample explanatory notes on the text. Eric W. Hagedorn is Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. Norbert College, Wisconsin. He has published a number of articles and book reviews on medieval philosophy of mind, language, and logic in journals including Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy and Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. (shrink)

Born in England and educated at Oxford, Ockham was the preeminent Franciscan thinker of the mid-fourteenth century. Because of his role in the bitter dispute between the Franciscans and Pope John XXII over evangelical poverty, he was excommunicated in 1328. After that he abandoned philosophy and theology proper, producing instead a series of political tracts on the ecclesiastical and secular power of the papacy.

With the growing interest in Renaissance studies, it is gratifying to see a major scholarly work on a little known philosopher of the Averroistic trend of Aristotelianism that had its seat in his native city of Bologna. Matsen’s study, whose first draft was submitted as a doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, opens with a summary presentation of Alessandro Achillini’s life and works based on archival documents and other first-hand sources. The body of the work focuses on two major themes: the (...) theory of universals and the concept of transcendentals. All students of philosophy are aware of the importance attached to the problem of universals by medieval schoolmen and the consequences that their solution had on their systems of philosophy. It is likewise known that the meaning and value of such transcendental concepts as being, unity, truth, goodness, and the like played a substantial role in the shaping of medieval metaphysics built mainly along Platonic and Aristotelian lines. The fact that a Renaissance man like Achillini carried on the discussion of both topics to such a degree as to devote an entire Quaestio to the study of universals and the first part of his De distinctionibus to the analysis of the transcendentals, shows, among other things, the extent to which Renaissance thought is indebted to medieval philosophy. What is less known, however, is the impact that William of Ockham, whose influence was felt throughout the entire fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, has also had on Renaissance thinkers, and especially on Achillini. A comparison between Ockham’s position on the nature of both the universals and the transcendentals has led Matsen to conclude that there is a striking similarity of view between Ockham and Achillini on many important issues and that the latter was the principal cause of the revival of Ockhamism at Bologna around 1500. (shrink)

Recently two pairs of authors have aimed to vindicate the longstanding "orthodox" or conventional claim that a first-class constraint generates a gauge transformation in typical gauge theories such as electromagnetism, Yang-Mills and General Relativity, in response to the Lagrangian-equivalent reforming tradition, in particular Pitts, _Annals of Physics_ 2014. Both pairs emphasize the coherence of the extended Hamiltonian formalism against what they take to be core ideas in Pitts 2014, but both overlook Pitts 2014's sensitivity to ways that one might rescue (...) the claim in question, including an additive redefinition of the electrostatic potential. Hence the bulk of the paper is best interpreted as arguing that the longstanding claim about separate first-class constraints is _either false or trivial_---de-Ockhamization (using more when less suffices by splitting one quantity into the sum of two) being trivial. Unfortunately section 9 of Pitts 2014, a primarily verbal argument that plays no role in other works, is refuted. Pooley and Wallace's inverse Legendre transformation to de-Ockhamized electromagnetism with an additively redefined electrostatic potential, however, opens the door to a precisely analogous calculation introducing a photon mass, which shows that a _second-class primary_ constraint generates a 'gauge transformation' in the exactly same sense---a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the orthodox claim that a first-class constraint generates a gauge transformation _and a second-class constraint does not_. A _reductio_ using massive electromagnetism was presaged in Pitts 2014. Gauge freedom by de-Ockhamization does not require any constraints at all, first-class or second-class, because any dynamical variable in any Lagrangian can be de-Ockhamized into exhibiting trivial additive artificial gauge freedom by splitting one quantity into the sum of two. Physically interesting gauge freedom, however, is typically generated by a tuned sum of first-class constraints, not each first-class constraint alone. (shrink)

As a Franciscan friar, student, teacher, philosopher, theologian, and political theorist, William of Ockham was and remains one of the most stimulating thinkers of the Middle Ages. The one consistent characteristic of his professional output—both as a student and later as an opponent of papal authoritarianism—was the provocative nature of his ideas. In required commentaries on standard theological texts as well as in his later, more independently inspired treatises, Ockham demonstrated a genuine talent for suggesting and sustaining a (...) number of original, unorthodox and, occasionally, even outrageous ideas. Accordingly, Ockham holds the distinction of being the most rejected but influential philosopher-theologian of the fourteenth century, an observation that applies to his views on causality in which, for example, Ockham held the principle of action at a distance in order to save the causal account of some phenomena. One of the more interesting distinctions that he made, however, occurs in his treatment of sacramental theology as part of his account of God's causal activity with respect to the sacraments. (shrink)

William of Ockham was tried for heresy due to his assertion that certain qualities can exist independently of substances. Scholars have assumed he made thisstrange assertion in order to account for the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. I argue, however, that the assertion was philosophically rather than theologically motivated. Ockham develops a nominalist substance ontology, according to which most changes can be explained as the result of local motion. Knowledge and virtue are changes in human beings that cannot be (...) so explained, however, because they are not entirely passive processes. In fact, knowledge and virtue require free will, which could not be considered truly free if it were not an independently existing quality. In this paper, I explain Ockham’s nominalist substance ontology and show how it functions as the sine qua non foundation for his uncompromising commitment to metaphysical libertarianism. (shrink)

William of Ockham was tried for heresy due to his assertion that certain qualities can exist independently of substances. Scholars have assumed he made thisstrange assertion in order to account for the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. I argue, however, that the assertion was philosophically rather than theologically motivated. Ockham develops a nominalist substance ontology, according to which most changes can be explained as the result of local motion. Knowledge and virtue are changes in human beings that cannot be (...) so explained, however, because they are not entirely passive processes. In fact, knowledge and virtue require free will, which could not be considered truly free if it were not an independently existing quality. In this paper, I explain Ockham’s nominalist substance ontology and show how it functions as the sine qua non foundation for his uncompromising commitment to metaphysical libertarianism. (shrink)

Does the soul have parts? What kind of parts? And how do all the parts make together a whole? Many ancient, medieval and early modern philosophers discussed these questions, thus providing a mereological analysis of the soul. The eleven chapters reconstruct and critically examine radically different theories. They make clear that the question of how a single soul can have an internal complexity was a crucial issue for many classical thinkers.

William of Ockham's semantic theory was founded on the idea that thought takes place in a language not unlike the languages in which spoken and written communication occur. This mental language was held to have a number of features in common with everyday languages. For example, mental language has simple terms, not unlike words, out of which complex expressions can be constructed. As with words, each of these terms has some meaning, or signification; in fact Ockham held that (...) the signification of everyday words derives precisely from the signification of mental terms. Furthermore, the meaning of a mental expression depends directly on the meaning of its constituent terms, as is the case with expressions in more familiar languages. (shrink)

“Ockham never wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics,” Jenny Pelletier tells us at the beginning of this monograph, “but the absence of such a commentary does not allow us to infer that he was uninterested in or skeptical of metaphysics” (1–2). Her central contention is that Ockham had a robust conception of metaphysics as a distinct branch of scientific knowledge concerning being and God. It is an argument worth making insofar as many scholars in recent years have held (...) that Ockham lacks a metaphysics or rejects the possibility of one. In opposing these claims, Pelletier also has much to say about what Ockham’s metaphysics includes and how it relates to other sciences. As the study of being, it considers .. (shrink)

This article examines the rise of modern secular, individualistic and rational legal thought from a historical point of view. It will be argued that the well known assumption needs to be critized, that the philosophical background of this development can only be traced back to Hobbes, Locke and Kant. Instead, the two authors of this article will point out that it was rather Ockham who first mentioned notions of modern liberal democracy in his philosophical opus. Furthermore, it will be (...) shown that the traditional interdisciplinary discourse on Thomas Hobbes falls short of a serious discussion of the most critical arguments. On a normative level it will be asked, what a Hobbesian (or for example Kantian discourse-ethical) conception can do for a normative justification of liberal democracy, nationally and transnationally. (shrink)

Scholars have often remarked on the surprising frequency with which medieval Irish writers referred to the heresiarch Pelagius and the extent to which they borrowed from his works. While there has been nothing like unanimity on the question of why the Irish showed such a liking for him, all are agreed that they were not true Pelagians, in the sense that the famous theological arguments for which Pelagius was eventually condemned never found favor with Irish writers. There is one document, (...) however — and that an important one — which explicitly accuses the Irish of Pelagianism: the letter of 640 to the northern Irish clergy from the pope-elect John IV and three others of the Roman curia, as reported by Bede. The letter has proved a mystery to modern writers, and one of the most recent has gone so far as to say that “Bede's intriguing and puzzling reference must remain just that.”. (shrink)

Duns Scotus's famous proposition was first attacked in a short polemical treatise attributed to Thomas of Sutton. By the time of Ockham, the proposition was known as the propositio famosa, so called by Walter Chatton, Ockham's colleague at Oxford and London, who defended it against Ockham's lengthy critique. At Paris, during the same period, it was called the propositio vulgata and was used approvingly by Francis of Meyronnes, Peter of Navarre and Durandus St. Pourçain. This “famous proposition” (...) was so controverted because on it depended the acceptance, with Duns Scotus, or the rejection, with Ockham, of theology as a strict, propter quid science. As its detractors and defenders must have realized, it also struck at the heart of the divergent philosophical outlooks of Duns Scotus and Ockham. For all of this, Duns Scotus's famous proposition and its history have all but escaped notice. (shrink)

This paper is intended to offer an analysis of William of Ockham's and Guido Terreni's discourses on papal authority; it illuminates how their polemical use of the same authority -- Thomas Aquinas -- resulted in two diametrically opposed views. Guido Terreni's precarious understanding of Aquinas' commentary on the gospel of Luke stretched papal authority on doctrinal definition to the point of papal infallibility. Whereas, William of Ockham's use (and transformation) of Aquinas' idea of the object of explicit faith (...) resulted in a demand that every ecclesiastical authority should have thorough knowledge of the Christian faith and take every caution in doctrinal decision making. The paper shows that, in the context of polemics, Aquinas' ecclesiology was dissolved and different aspects of it were exaggerated by Terreni and Ockham. Thus, the paper also highlights Ockham's polemical skill in turning Aquinas -- the papalists' favourite authority -- against them. (shrink)

William of Ockham discussed the fallacy of amphiboly twice in his writings. The first treatment was in his Expositio super libros Elenchorum, where he simply presents Aristotle’s treatment, updates it with some Latin examples, and tells us it is not too important, since we do not often run into cases of ambiguity of thiskind. Later, in his Summa logicae, however, he extends his treatment appreciably. He here includes under ambiguous statements philosophical and theological sentences which are improperly stated. Led (...) by Aristotle, Augustine and Anselm, Ockham finds that in their writings they give us instances of improper statements which need to be restated properly before they can be evaluated as true or false. These leads provide for Ockham a key to unlocking the teaching treasures of the Ancients. (shrink)

William of Ockham on the right to Use Goods Quintessentially medieval—an almost word-for-word refutation of an already prolix defense of several improbationes of earlier papal decrees—its greatest claim to fame has usually been its length, not the content of Ockham's argument. Annabel Brett, for example, concluded in a remarkable study that William of Ockham had failed to adequately answer Pope John XXII's criticism of the Michaelist interpretation of Franciscan poverty. Specifically, she argued that he "failed to isolate (...) a potestas licita which would be a power to perform acts which are licit in the sense of consonant with right reason, but are not strictly just." One could imagine the pope making the very same claim, but this would be to misunderstand Ockham's point. It is true that Ockham probably had little chance of convincing the pope of the coherence of his position. But this is not to say that his position was untenable.A common criticism of Ockham's theory of poverty is that he was, more or less, fighting on John XXII's own terms, which generally also leads to the conclusion that Ockham's theory is deficient in some respect. But if Ockham can be accused of fighting on the pope's ground because he responded to Quia vir reprobus point-by-point, then the pope can equally be accused of fighting on Michaelist ground because he was doing essentially the same thing. Alternatively, this claim might be interpreted as meaning that Ockham accepted as axiomatic certain claims of John XXII and then proceeded to construct an alternate theory to that of the pope's; consequently, this argument would continue, because Ockham could not get past certain foundational statements he was unable to properly address in the pope's claims. It is a corollary of the argument presented here that this was not the case.One of the paradoxes of the Franciscan modus vivendi was that, although their goal was to disengage from the civil order as far as all property relationships went, and despite the fact that Francis strongly commanded all brothers "through obedience" not to ask letters of the Roman curia, it quickly became necessary to have recourse to the papacy for all sorts of things. It is easy to see how this paradoxical relationship with the papacy could lead to trouble for the order, and indeed it was in the course of one of these appeals that the "Franciscan crisis under John XXII" might be said to have begun. The story, recounted by a Minorite who leaves no doubt as to his partisanship, is that when a Franciscan, Berengar Talon , defended a Beguin's view that Christ and his disciples possessed nothing, "either individually or in common, by right of ownership and lordship" against the Dominican inquisitor Jean de Beaune, the latter accused Berengar, too, of heresy. Not surprisingly, given the historical success of this method, Berengar appealed to the pope. As David Burr has said, "John reacted vigorously and, one suspects, enthusiastically." This time around, however, the pope was not so certain that the Franciscan position was the correct one. This appeal served as a pretext for re-opening the poverty "question," even if the ultimate motive for this move remain enigmatic.1 John XXII's Position on UseIf we must continue to guess at what prompted John to broaden his attack, one point jumps out from the first version of Ad conditorem canonum: of the three traditional monastic vows, poverty was the least important. The pope, probably following Hervaeus Natalis, was equally convinced that "the perfection of the Christian life consists principally and essentially in charity," and that.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:I. William of Ockham and Mental SynonymyIn recent years an important point of discussion among the scholars of William of Ockham has been the possibility of accounting for a reductionist interpretation of Ockham's mental language. Especially, the debate focused on the legitimacy of eliminating connotative simple terms from mental language by reducing them to their nominal definition. The distinction between absolute and connotative terms plays an (...) important role in Ockham's philosophy of language. Ockham introduces it as a subdivision of the class of categorematic terms, i.e. of the terms provided with signification, and such a distinction overlaps that between concrete and abstract terms. In the Summa Logicae, Part I, chap. 10, devoted to the explanation of such a distinction, Ockham makes three major claims concerning connotative terms.First, unlike absolute simple terms, connotative simple terms signify something primarily and something else secondarily. Paradigmatic examples of connotative simple terms are 'white' and 'father,' while instances of absolute terms are 'animal,' 'man,' and 'whiteness.' The term 'white' is connotative for it signifies something primarily while co-signifying something else secondarily .Second, unlike absolute simple terms, connotative simple terms do not have a real definition but only a nominal one. While a real definition is intended to capture the real essence of the defined thing, a nominal definition is none other than a linguistic explication of a name's signification. Only concrete and abstract terms of the category of substance, and abstract terms of the category of quality, can have a real definition. The reason is that, for Ockham, only individual substances and qualities can exist outside the mind, therefore only such entities can be grasped immediately and directly, by means of acts of intelligible intuitive cognition. Any other term can have only a nominal definition, for each of them can make reference to nothing but to fictive or only putatively existent entities. A nominal definition, in particular, is made in such a way that something is expressed in recto and something else in obliquo . Ockham indicates 'something having whiteness' as the nominal definition of 'white': in it, 'something' is expressed in recto, while 'whiteness' in obliquo.Third and finally, Ockham says that a connotative term has only one nominal definition, while an absolute term can have several real definitions.According to these claims, the problem of the existence of connotative terms in mental language might be reconstructed as follows. Ockham holds to two fundamental tenets about mental language and connotation: first, synonymous terms cannot be found in mental language and second, each connotative simple term can have only one nominal definition, as was said. Ockham is unequivocal about these principles in his works. But if an interpreter also supposes Ockham subscribing to the view that connotative simple terms are synonymous with their nominal definitions, the interpreter must conclude that, for Ockham, connotative simple terms and their nominal definitions cannot both be present in mental language. Nonetheless, since Ockham seems to admit the existence of both connotative simple terms and their nominal definitions in mental language, one of the previous sentences needs to be revised.Up to this day many proposals of revision have been put on the table, but it seems to me that they can be reduced to three principal ones.The first proposal suggests reconsidering claim , while preserving the reasoning -, since - are claims Ockham indisputably states. As is known, this was Paul V. Spade's initial position. The gist of Spade's influential argument was that connotative simple terms cannot exist in mental language for if they did, they would be synonymous with their fully expanded nominal definitions. According to , though, synonymy cannot be found in mental language. But Ockham grants the.. (shrink)

In ‘The Republic’, Plato famously reduced practical authority to theoretical authority, arguing that a just society must be governed by philosophers. This idea of the philosopher-king flourished in the medieval specula principum. The medieval papacy was grounded on a similar blend of practical and theoretical authority. The Pope was credited with the capacity to decide on the truth of beliefs because he was elected to office. In their fight against the omnicompetence of the Pope, Marsilius of Padua and William of (...) Ockham were aware that in order to contain the power of the papal office, they had to find a way of legitimately distinguishing between theoretical and practical authority. Consequently, both of them severed the traditional link between political theory and virtue ethics, considering the virtue and the wisdom of the ruler as accidental to the legitimacy of government. In contrast to this demotion of theoretical authority in the state, both Marsilius and William argued that experts should play a bigger role in the church. The definition of true belief and heresy should not, according to them, lie in the hands of an elected official (i. e. the Pope), but rather in the hands of theological experts. This article aims to show that the critique of the papal monarchy gave rise to a new understanding of the distinction between theoretical and practical authority. (shrink)

This book recounts the remarkable history of efforts by significant medieval thinkers to accommodate the ontology of the Trinity within the framework of Aristotelian logic and ontology. These efforts were remarkable because they pushed creatively beyond the boundaries of existing thought while trying to strike a balance between the Church's traditional teachings and theoretical rigor in a context of institutional politics. In some cases, good theology, good philosophy, and good politics turned out to be three different things. The principal thinkers (...) discussed are Augustine, Boethius, Abélard, Gilbert of Poitiers, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham. The aspects of Trinitarian doctrine dealt with are primarily internal ontological questions about the Trinity. The approach draws on history of theology and philosophy, as well as on the modern formal disciplines of set-theoretic semantics and formal ontology. Augustine inaugurated the project of constructing models of the Trinity in language drawn from Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, especially the conceptual framework of Aristotle's Categories. He used the Aristotelian notions of substance and relation to set up a model whose aim was not so much to demystify the Trinity as to demonstrate the logical consistency of maintaining that there is one and only one God at the same time as maintaining that there are three distinct persons, each of whom is God. Standing against this tradition are various heretical accounts of the Trinity. The book also analyzes these traditions, using the same techniques. All these accounts of the Trinity are evaluated relative to the three constraints under which they were formed, bearing in mind that the constraints on philosophical theorizing are not limited to internal consistency but also take note of explanatory power. Besides analyzing and evaluating individual accounts of the Trinity, the book provides a novel framework within which different theories can be compared. (shrink)

William of Ockham discussed the fallacy of amphiboly twice in his writings. The first treatment was in his Expositio super libros Elenchorum, where he simply presents Aristotle’s treatment, updates it with some Latin examples, and tells us it is not too important, since we do not often run into cases of ambiguity of thiskind. Later, in his Summa logicae, however, he extends his treatment appreciably. He here includes under ambiguous statements philosophical and theological sentences which are improperly stated. Led (...) by Aristotle, Augustine and Anselm, Ockham finds that in their writings they give us instances of improper statements which need to be restated properly before they can be evaluated as true or false. These leads provide for Ockham a key to unlocking the teaching treasures of the Ancients. (shrink)

Ockham’s theory of natural rights was based on a careful definition of the basic juridical terms dominium and ius utendi, as well as on the idea of human agency and morality. By defining a right as a licit power of action in accordance with right reason, Ockham placed rights firmly in the agent. A right was a subjective power of action. Ockham’s theory of natural rights was influential for later natural rights theories. Its advocates included leading thinkers (...) of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whose views on the right to life, its relation to the right to property, and the state of nature resembled those ideas already developed by Ockham approximately three hundred years earlier. (shrink)

Alfred j freddoso ("journal of philosophy", 1983) proposed a model for william of ockham's attempt to allow that every true statement about the past is necessary while avoiding fatalism. i argue that freddoso's model cannot be ockham's for reasons that bring out ockham's opposition to metaphysical density and show that ockhamist entities rely on their temporal spread for features which other philosophers would explain by appeal to properties (or dispositions) existing in the entity. i suggest that (...) class='Hi'>ockham's own response to the conflict between necessity of the past and fatalism was a verbal maneuver unsupported by any clear semantical model. (shrink)

In seinem Traktat über Prädestination diskutiert Ockham die philosophischen Schwierigkeiten, die das christliche Dogma der Vorherbestimmung des Menschen zu ewiger Seligkeit oder Verdammnis aufwirft als einen spezifischen Fall des Problems des logischen Determinismus. Es gelingt Ockham nicht, dieses Problem zu lösen, was einerseits in seinem semantischen Wahrheitsbegriff, andererseits in einer fehlenden Differenzierung zwischen einem ontologischen und einem logischen Verständnis von Kontingenz begründet liegt. Diese Punkte führen zu einer Reihe von Ambivalenzen in Ockhams Argumentation, die darauf hindeuten, dass dieser (...) zwar über die Grundlagen einer möglichen Lösung verfügt, diese aber aufgrund seiner ontologischen Sparsamkeit nicht kohärent umsetzt.In his treatise on predestination, Ockham discusses the philosophical riddles caused by this Christian dogma as a specific case of the problem of logical determinism. Ockham does not succeed in solving this problem, which is due to his semantic notion of truth as well as to a missing differentiation between an ontological and logical interpretation of contingency. These points lead to a number of ambivalences in his argumentation, which suggest that Ockham has the conditions of a possible solution available but his ontological parsimony inhibits their coherent implementation. (shrink)

In seinem Traktat über Prädestination diskutiert Ockham die philosophischen Schwierigkeiten, die das christliche Dogma der Vorherbestimmung des Menschen zu ewiger Seligkeit oder Verdammnis aufwirft als einen spezifischen Fall des Problems des logischen Determinismus. Es gelingt Ockham nicht, dieses Problem zu lösen, was einerseits in seinem semantischen Wahrheitsbegriff, andererseits in einer fehlenden Differenzierung zwischen einem ontologischen und einem logischen Verständnis von Kontingenz begründet liegt. Diese Punkte führen zu einer Reihe von Ambivalenzen in Ockhams Argumentation, die darauf hindeuten, dass dieser (...) zwar über die Grundlagen einer möglichen Lösung verfügt, diese aber aufgrund seiner ontologischen Sparsamkeit nicht kohärent umsetzt.In his treatise on predestination, Ockham discusses the philosophical riddles caused by this Christian dogma as a specific case of the problem of logical determinism. Ockham does not succeed in solving this problem, which is due to his semantic notion of truth as well as to a missing differentiation between an ontological and logical interpretation of contingency. These points lead to a number of ambivalences in his argumentation, which suggest that Ockham has the conditions of a possible solution available but his ontological parsimony inhibits their coherent implementation. (shrink)

Historians of fourteenth-century science have long recognized the extraordinary work at both Oxford and Paris in which natural philosophy was becoming highly mathematical. The movement to subject natural philosophy to a mathematical analysis and to quantify such qualities as heat, color, and of course speed surely stands as one of the most significant aspects of late medieval science. Yet as Edith Sylla has observed, because qualities and quantities pertain to different categories in Aristotelian theory, one might expect Aristotelian theorists to (...) avoid quantifying qualities. Even more serious still, the very task of quantifying physical qualities exposes a tension in the nature of science that was discussed first by Aristotle in his Posterior Analytics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In his influential study, The Harvest of Medieval Theology, Heiko Oberman had drawn two broad categories by which to classify the late medieval conception of Holy Scripture and the Catholic Tradition. The first, Tradition I, held Scripture to be the sole source of Catholic doctrine such that Tradition was equated with the exegetical contribution of the holy doctors. What Oberman deemed Tradition II maintained that Holy Scripture is not (...) sufficient for the determination of Catholic doctrine such that it needed to be supplemented by a separate extra-scriptural source of revelation. And it is within Tradition II that Oberman placed William of Ockham. That is to say Ockham was deemed a proponent of a so-called ‘two-sources’ principle of divine revelation. In fact, Oberman went on to say that, “we may conclude that Occam is not just playing with the two-sources theory but that he indeed believes in the solidity of the argument in its totality.”1 Influential as Oberman’s theory has been over the past forty years, however, the strict categorization of ‘one source’ over and against ‘two-sources’ may indeed be detrimental to an assessment of Ockham’s views on the authoritative determination of Catholic doctrine.This essay will focus primarily on Ockham’s conception of biblical authority relative to that of extra-scriptural sources, most notably papal authority. We will also look at two other fourteenth-century Franciscans, his predecessor John Duns Scotus and his successor William Woodford. This will provide us with an opportunity to assess the ways in which different Franciscan theologians handled the nuances of doctrinal authority in light of the specific concerns they faced. In the case of Scotus such questions were less polemically charged than they were for Ockham and Woodford. They usually came up within the confines of his Ordinatio and pertained to doctrines that Scotus willingly embraced even as he tried to make sense of their formulation. Ockham and Woodford, on the other hand, faced flesh and blood opponents in fierce debates: Ockham against the papacy and Woodford against the English Wycliffites. In an era when the precise relationship between authoritative sources was not very well defined, we will see these latter two Franciscans take different tacks as they addressed the exigencies of the moment, thereby highlighting the flexibility of Franciscan views of scriptural and extra-scriptural authority in the fourteenth century.First, though, we can offer some perspective on Oberman’s one source/two sources dichotomy. Oberman was one among many scholars—Protestant and Catholic—charting a grand history of Scripture and Tradition in the run-up to the Second Vatican Council. Much scholarly interest was specifically focused on what the Council of Trent had meant in its formal statement of April 8, 1546 when referring to “the truth and discipline [of the Gospel] contained in the written books and in the unwritten traditions.”2 In an effort to draw out the full intention of this statement scholars turned to an earlier draft to see if it could further illuminate what the Tridentine fathers meant. The earlier draft spoke of the truth and discipline of the Gospel being contained partly in the written books and partly in the unwritten traditions. In light of this fact scholars asked whether the final edition’s use of ‘and’ meant that all Catholic doctrine comes down fully in Scripture and fully in the traditions of the Church, such that either form of transmission sufficiently communicates this doctrine; or does the ‘and’ carry the weight of the earlier ‘partly’ such that Scripture contains only a portion of the truth and thus must be supplemented by unwritten traditions?Did the change from ‘partly … partly’ to ‘and’ signify a change in meaning? Not according to Oberman who was sure that the Council intended to affirm that Scripture does not contain all doctrinal truths.3 Whereas George Tavard concluded just the.. (shrink)

The English Franciscan, William of Ockham (c. 1285-1349), was one of the most important thinkers of the later middle ages. Summoned to Avignon in 1324 to answer charges of heresy, Ockham became convinced that Pope John XXII was himself a heretic in denying the complete poverty of Christ and the apostles and a tyrant in claiming supremacy over the Roman empire. Ockham's political writings were a result of these personal convictions, but also include systematic discourses on the (...) basis and functions of spiritual and secular power as well as exhaustive discussions of Franciscan poverty and the general problem of papal heresy. Ockham emerges in this study as a man deeply committed to natural and Christian human rights, who found these fundamental values so seriously menaced in his time that their survival could be assured only by radical, even revolutionary, personal action and by a basic reworking of traditional political thought. (shrink)

In this article, I build upon Jean-Albert Vinel’s account of Augustine’s “liturgical argument” against the Pelagians by exploring how and why Augustine uses both the givenness of the practice of infant baptism and its ritual components as evidence for his theological conclusions in opposition to those of the Pelagians. First, I explore infant baptism in the Roman North African Church before and during Augustine’s ministry. Second, I interpret Augustine’s rhetorical adaptation of the custom in his attempt to delineate the defining (...) characteristics of Catholic Christianity in the early fifth century. I show how Augustine mobilizes his belief in the efficacy of the Church’s practice of infant baptism to make explicit a boundary marker of “Catholic” Christianity, which was long implicit in the practice itself. Perceiving the consequences of Pelagianism, Augustine organizes his anti-Pelagian soteriology around the central node of infant baptism, the most theologically and rhetorically strategic means by which he could refute the Pelagian heresy and underwrite what he understood to be the traditional vision of sin and salvation evident in the baptismal rite. (shrink)