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Nominalist Controversies

Especially in the 14th century, controversies associated with the opposition between nominalism and realism greatly exercised philosophers and theologians in the Latin West. These terms have been been variously understood, but as a first approximation, nominalism wants to deny claims about the real basis of abstractions that the realism of this context wants to affirm.

In this case, a polar opposition is concealed behind a pair of concrete terms (nominalism, realism), where in context one is understood as the simple negation of the other. As usual with debates around distinctions based on polar opposition rather than more limited and definite determinate negation, the greatest interest often lies in the way each side tries to recover something like the strong points of the other side, but in its own terms.

These controversies are worth lingering over for several reasons. For one thing, they help illustrate the great diversity, subtlety, and liveliness of medieval thought. For another, they develop many fine distinctions that are of lasting value in talking about human knowledge and understanding. We would all like to rightly apprehend things, whatever that means. The waters are commonly muddied not only by insufficient distinctions among things, but also by fundamental unclarity or ambiguity on the meaning of “existence” or “reality”, which gets worse where abstract things are involved. Who we might think was right in the debates is of secondary importance compared to clarifications of this kind. Finally, these debates involved much discussion of mental representation, its origins, and its role in thought.

Speaking with very broad brush, nominalism begins as a critique of a sort of “platonism”. Such platonism wants to say the universal is more real than the particular. It may go on to claim that abstract entities are as real as — or more real than — concrete ones. It may extend to further claims that universals simply “exist” in some pure way, independent of space and time. Nominalism in general wants to say the opposite, that universals are actually not real at all.

Aristotle already criticized platonist views of the sort just mentioned, while still maintaining that the development of universals is essential to knowledge. I think that in the big picture, he wanted to recommend an essentially even-handed approach, recognizing both universals and particulars as necessary to any developed view of experience, while pointing out their very different and complementary roles. Whatever we may think about the reality or unreality or existence or nonexistence of given things or of various kinds of things, we need universals to support the implicit reasoning standing behind any developed knowledge. We also need particulars as practical starting points, and as cross-checks to keep us honest. This does not yet make any claim about reality or existence that might support such needs. Aristotle often practiced a careful minimalism, sticking to essentials and leaving other questions open, and this is a good case in point.

Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas wanted to develop Aristotle’s position into a firmer doctrine, classically called moderate realism. Most people agree that Aristotle thought universals do not “exist” independently of particular things and thought. Albert and Thomas argued that implicitly, what Aristotle said committed him to 1) a claim that universals are real and 2) a claim that universals exist, but only in concrete things and in thought.

Nominalists especially disputed the claim that universals exist in concrete things. They most commonly advocated a mental origin of universals, while differing on the precise status attributed to them. Already in the 12th century, Roscellinus had argued that universals are mere names (root of the word “nominalism”). Whether or not the great Peter Abelard should be interpreted as a nominalist or a middle-of-the road “conceptualist” is contested among scholars.

The theologian William of Occam (1285 – 1347) was the most famous medieval nominalist. Early in his career, he argued that universals were ficta (“fictions”) of the mind. Later, he worried that this still tacitly presupposed they were representations, which would seem to still imply something corresponding to them in external objects. He then argued that external objects have causal impact on the mind, but not by representation.

The important secular master John Buridan (1301 – 1358) is usually also called a nominalist. Buridan was one of the leading logicians of the middle ages, and wrote on a wide range of philosophical questions. He had several noteworthy students who are also considered nominalists, including the logician, natural philosopher, and bishop Albert of Saxony (1320 – 1390). Marsilius of Inghen (1340 – 1396) was another nominalist who wrote on logic, natural philosophy, and theology. The theologian Gregory of Rimini (1300 – 1358) is also considered a nominalist.

The great theologian John Duns Scotus (1265 – 1308) was a commited realist who nonetheless influenced Occam on some relatively unrelated points. The influential Walter Burley (1275 – 1344) is sometimes called an extreme realist. Paul of Venice (1369 – 1429) was formerly classed as a nominalist, but is now considered a realist.

Among those who were called nominalists, there were many different views and distinctions related to the complex medieval theories of sensible and intelligible “species”. In one aspect, these were mental representations, but theories of sensible species usually had a physical component loosely inspired by Stoicism. Occam denied species, while Buridan made use of them.

From the 12th century onward, Latin philosophers developed sophisticated original theories of the different kinds of “supposition”, or generic ways in which something said can be meant. The general notion was that the kind of supposition that should be read into a concrete utterance should be determined by analyzing the context of the utterance in various ways. This was basically a kind of semantics. What is perhaps surprising is that broadly similar supposition theories were largely shared by dedicated nominalists like Occam and commited realists like Walter Burley, providing a common vocabulary.

On a side note, Occam’s causal impact theory seems problematic from the point of view of the development here. While its avoidance of dependence on representation is attractive, a direct causal link from external objects to thoughts does not seem adequate to account for the full range of diversity of thoughts. Also, there seems to be an incipient mentalism already at work here, related to that of Avicenna.

Occam was a theological voluntarist and a fideist. Fideism is the belief that faith offers a kind of knowledge superior to reason, an extreme position that was repeatedly condemned by the Church. Occam has nonetheless often been named as a major precursor of the point of view of modern science. Even though some connections can be made, this seems questionable as well, given his mainly theological intent and the character of the theology he promoted.

Constructive Realism?

I’ve previously suggested there should be an overlap between non-naive realism and non-subjective idealism, and indicated a preference for constructive reasoning in formal contexts. The other day I referred in passing to the “constructive-flavored” character of the principle of sufficient reason or “nothing comes from nothing”. The “flavored” suffix refers to the fact that the contexts in which the principle applies are not formal, so the application of “constructive” is somewhat metaphorical. But the connection with sufficient reason is easy to see. In constructive reasoning, every step requires evidence. Therefore, all assumptions are hypothetical or defeasible. No valid assertion “comes from nothing”. I was talking about secondary causes and neoplatonic “procession” and what not as a sort of illustration of this on the side of the development or unfolding of conceptual content. In another recent post, I was stressing the role of dialectic and practical judgment over pure deductive reasoning in Aristotle. Putting all this together, it occured to me that “non-naive realism” might be further specified as “constructive realism” (now dropping the suffix for convenience) in which the constructively flavored activity consists of said dialectic and practical judgment.

In contrast to Michael Dummet, I don’t at all see why constructive needs to mean “anti-realist”, and I don’t like such dichotomous divisions in general. A constructive realism would be about achieving realism through the mediation of concrete dialectic and practical judgment and development of content (the only way it really can be done, I think). It would thus be a mediated realism, in which the thickness of the mediation yields the substantiality of the reality.

Avicenna

The Iranian philosopher Ibn Sina (980 – 1037) — known to the Latins as Avicenna — had a large impact on Latin medieval thought. He was also an important medical authority up through the Renaissance. In terms specifically of the relation between philosophy and religion, the spirit of Ibn Sina’s work was a conciliatory one, in that way a bit like the emphasis of Aquinas on one truth. In terms of debates in the Latin world, he was most often cited by people in the broadly Augustinian as opposed to Aristotelian stream, but Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas also used some of his formulations.

Ibn Sina was original in many ways. He recounts that he improved on Aristotle by putting God at the beginning instead of the end (See First Principles Come Last; God and the Soul). He also liked to talk about Being, which seems to have caught the attention of Aquinas and Duns Scotus (see Being, Existence; Ontology). Along with Augustine, he largely anticipates the “I think, therefore I am” of Descartes. Many Augustinians found agreeable resonances in things he said about what I am here calling subjectivity (see Augustinian Interiority). None of this seems particularly like a recommendation to me. Where Averroes criticized Avicenna from a more purely Aristotelian point of view (as he often did), I think the arguments of Averroes generally seem much more sound.

The Latin translations of Avicenna’s works introduced the Latin term for representation into philosophical discourse. Early antecedents of modern mentalism can be found in Augustine, and to some extent even further back in Plotinus, but Avicenna contributed significantly to its crystallization. He introduced the terminology of intentionality, as well as a pregnant distinction between “first” and “second” intentions. First intentions were a kind of immediate mental objects, while second intentions applied to thoughts about the first. Here, I believe, is the historical source of the two-stage theory of representation that Brandom has been concerned to criticize. Descartes and Locke picked it up from the Latin scholastics.

The German philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote an intriguing — but I think misguided — little book called Avicenna und die Aristotelische Linke (1952). By analogy with the historical category of “Left Hegelianism”, he wanted to develop a concept of “Left Aristotelianism” in the Latin middle ages. His selection of Avicenna as its main representative is quite perplexing in view of the way citations to Avicenna most often figured in Latin disputation, where they were most often used to support what seem to me like more conservative, “Augustinian” positions in opposition to more Aristotelian positions. Bloch does quote some interesting passages about the concept of matter. To me, these seem possibly related to the notion of multiple substantial forms, which was one of the biggest points of contention between Augustinians and Latin Aristotelians.

(Albert the Great and Aquinas wanted to strongly insist that each thing has a single substantial form. What makes this difficult to evaluate is that the specific notion of “substantial” form is a much later — and much narrower and more univocal — invention not clearly apparent in Aristotle’s own works. So, the single-substantial-form thesis cannot be Aristotle’s own, and I don’t feel a need to defend it, even though I usually strongly favor the Aristotelian side in Augustinian-versus-Aristotelian disputes. Consequently, even though (as I understand it) one of the main motivations for the multiple-substantial-forms thesis was to support a very non-Aristotelian dualism of soul and body and I don’t like that motivation, the idea itself of multiple forms does not seem inherently bad. It might be understood as a sort of reification of the different senses or meanings of “form” in Aristotle.)

Belief

Al-Farabi’s 10th century reading of Aristotle — which set many patterns for later Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin developments — was generally historically salutary, but among other things reflected a definite “theoreticist” bias, strongly privileging episteme (“deductive science”, or knowledge in a strong sense) over dialectic and practical judgment. It was not until Kant that this bias began to be counterbalanced again. Even Hegel still understated the role of dialectic and practical judgment in Aristotle. (See also Aristotelian Demonstration; The Epistemic Modesty of Plato and Aristotle.)

It is in this context of dialectic and practical judgment that I want to think about belief. I have a bit of a double meaning in mind, recalling both discussions among analytic philosophers and questions about faith and reason.

To the analytic philosophers, I want to recommend a pragmatically flavored emphasis on sound belief as a result of dialectic and practical judgment, to replace many uses of “true belief” that is supposed to simply correspond to a state of affairs. (See also “Said Of”; Brandom on Truth; Commitment.)

In the context of faith and reason, I want to respectfully recommend that faith should be decoupled from a list of things one is supposed to assert or “believe”. I have always believed that the highest concept of faith is instead a pure affective attitude and way of being and doing that resembles hope and charity and an anticipation of grace. (See also Theology.)

Errors of the Philosophers

As the works of Aristotle and other authors translated from the Arabic became unbanned and began to be understood, this caused considerable tension in the previously insular Latin West. Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and others worked to reconcile the two intersecting traditions. Secular masters of arts who were not theologians often concentrated mainly on reading the new texts as they stood — a tradition that continued through the Renaissance. The bishop of Paris issued lists of condemned propositions in 1270 and 1277 (see Wikipedia and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Scholars generally agree that there was no coherent group or single individual targeted by the whole of the longer 1277 one, which also contained a few propositions endorsed by the not-yet-canonized Aquinas.

In the 20th century, Pierre Duhem influentially claimed that the 1277 condemnation had a large positive effect on nascent medieval natural science, by freeing it from the alleged dogmatism of Aristotle, but with more research, scholarly consensus has backed sharply away from this (although I think there is still some distance to go). This is a good example of the lingering effects of anti-Aristotelian prejudice. Contrary to the stereotype, medieval Aristotelians often cheerfully adopted new ideas when they seemed to have merit, and Italian Aristotelianism in particular was especially friendly to such developments.

A little treatise attributed to Giles of Rome (excerpt relating to Aristotle here) on “the errors of the philosophers” appeared around 1270. In other writings, Giles was by no means hostile to all philosophy, but here he focused on matters of theological concern at the time, with a bit more motivation and analysis than the actual condemnations. “Philosophers” refers with some specificity to the canon of falsafa translated from the Arabic.

As Giles analyzed it, the main issue underlying concerns about Aristotle himself lay in the principle that later scholastics referred to as “nothing comes from nothing”, and that Leibniz later endorsed as the principle of sufficient reason. Leibniz and others found this constructive-flavored notion implicit in Aristotelian and neoplatonic thought to be compatible with theological concerns. More generally, many theologians have found ways to read the broad spirit of Greek rationalism and naturalism as not inherently opposed to their concerns. Greek rationalism and naturalism, unlike many of their modern variants, were not reductive in nature. The thought of Aristotle in particular provides sophisticated resources for integrating concepts of immanent purpose in a rational account of the world that makes no special pleadings.

The notion of creation from nothing is itself a theological interpretation not literally present in Genesis, but creation in time is literally present, and many theologians have been reluctant to give it a figurative interpretation, even though broad principles of interpretation as far back as Augustine allow for figurative interpretation when there are issues with a literal reading. Aquinas, for one, took a diplomatic middle position that reason cannot decide between possibilities of eternal creation or creation in time, so he adopted a forgiving attitude toward Aristotle on the related question of the eternity of the world. I believe Aristotle and the neoplatonists on the other hand clearly thought reason did rule out a creation in time, and that this did not in any way destroy higher spiritual values. Personally, I want to say that they were right on this, so I respectfully disagree with the diplomatic Thomistic position, while considering it historically progressive in its context. (See also Fortunes of Aristotle; God and the Soul; Strong Omnipotence; Occasionalism; Pseudo-Dionysius on the Soul.)

Occasionalism

The conservative Sunni Islamic theologian and Sufi al-Ghazali (1058 – 1111 CE) wrote a famous denunciation of philosophers in Islam, called The Incoherence of the Philosophers. (In Latin, “incoherence” was rendered as “destruction”.) This was a classic statement of the occasionalist doctrine that everything that happens is directly caused by the will of God, and all other explanations are illusory. This is a kind of consequence of strong theological voluntarism. Spurred by the voluntarism of Descartes, many 17th century Cartesians later adopted occasionalist views. Related voluntarist views were earlier strongly voiced by Philo of Alexandria, and later in the Latin West by Franciscan theologians such as Duns Scotus and William of Occam.

The great Aristotelian commentator Ibn Rushd or Averroes responded to Ghazali on behalf of the philosophers, in a work entitled Incoherence of the Incoherence. An Islamic jurist as well as a philosopher, he argued in another work never translated to Latin that the Koran effectively tells those who are capable of rational understanding to study philosophy. In his response to Ghazali, Averroes pointed out that Ghazali’s argument made inferences from the empirical to the divine. Ghazali had said that everything that happens is deliberated and knowingly chosen by God. This actually Aristotelian terminology of deliberation and choice applies to empirical agents, insofar as they want and lack something. Averroes responded that God lacks nothing, and therefore does not choose or deliberate like a human would.

This small piece of a much larger argument is illustrative of a typical contrast. Broadly Aristotelian and neoplatonic views both emphasized the eternity of the divine as part of its perfection. They also took “secondary” causes very seriously, because they took something like Hegelian mediation seriously. Conversely, if God were directly responsible (causally or morally) for everything that happens, this would abolish all causal or moral responsibility of all other beings, and indeed all distinction whatsoever. (See also Strong Omnipotence.)

Strong Omnipotence

The Greek-speaking Jewish theologian Philo of Alexandria (1st century BCE to 1st CE) was perhaps the original antiphilosopher. That is to say, he used some philosophical ideas with learning and sophistication, but was unequivocally hostile to the autonomy of reason, which was something of a commonplace among the Greek philosophers.

For Philo, any equivalent of ethical virtue seems to come exclusively from faith in the revelation of the Greek Old Testament, taken as the literal word of God. To me, this sounds like an unfortunate precursor to today’s fundamentalisms, which ignore all sounder theology, and preclude the very possibility of genuine ethics. Where there is no allowance for virtue independent of one-sided authority, it may become all too permissible to hate whomever is called an unbeliever or heretic. Many other theologians have been far less one-sided, allowing for at least a relative autonomy of reason, and a possibility of genuine virtue independent of sheer obedience to presumed dictates of revelation. With them, a moral philosopher can find common ground.

Philo may have originated the suggestion that Platonic ideas exist in the mind of an omnipotent God. An emphatic supernaturalist, he defended creation from nothing, grounded in an ultra-strong version of divine omnipotence. On this view, God has absolute liberty, and thus can do absolutely any absolutely arbitrary thing at any time, as with the later Islamic occasionalists. Philo explicitly contrasted this view with those of all the Greek philosophers and those influenced by them, who at the very least would expect God to act in ways that are genuinely reasonable and good, and thus put reason and goodness before any will. Unlike the God of Aquinas, for instance, the God of Philo is even supposed to be able to do logically impossible things if he so wills. This is extreme theological voluntarism.

Philonic strong omnipotence is precisely the kind of thing Leibniz later said would make of God an arbitrary tyrant, with disastrous ethical and social consequences. Notions of divine will tacitly assumed to be known with certainty by human authority, and not subject to any inquiry go against the whole better tradition of faith seeking understanding, and make it all too easy to mask hate in the name of supposed holiness.

In all three of the major monotheistic traditions, this dangerous kind of voluntarism has been applied by some to God. Some have gone on to attribute similar supernatural free will to humans as well, on the ground that they are made in the image of a God that has that kind of completely unconstrained freedom. This is using bad theology to justify bad anthropology. As anthropology, it is what Hegel called the illusion of Mastery. Some bad philosophers have simply postulated a similar completely unconstrained “negative” freedom or “freedom of indifference” for humans, without even a pretended explanation of how this could be. (See also Freedom and Free Will.)

My main source for statements about Philo here is the actually sympathetic essay by Harry Austryn Wolfson, in his book Religious Philosophy: A Group of Essays (1961). I always thought of Wolfson as a Spinoza scholar, but Wikipedia says he is actually best known for another, larger work on Philo. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a nice summary of current Philo scholarship. (See also Fragility of the Good; Theology.)

Fortunes of Aristotle

The history of the reception of Aristotle is actually quite fascinating. Aristotle, the greatest of the Greek philosophers, lived from 384 – 322 BCE. While very famous and influential during his own lifetime, his work went into eclipse for a while, shortly after his death. According to Strabo (1st century CE), Aristotle collected the world’s first library of handwritten manuscripts, which eventually became the starter for the famous library of Alexandria in Egypt. In between, the library and Aristotle’s own original manuscripts were privately held by the family of Theophrastus, moved to what is now Turkey, and allowed to deteriorate. Theophrastus, Aristotle’s best known direct student, was mainly interested in his own research in natural science, and is known as the father of botany.

Meanwhile, for several centuries, philosophy came to be dominated by Stoicism, founded by Zeno of Citium (334 – 262 BCE) and codified by Chryssippus (279 – 206 BCE). Stoicism, with its unique combination of rough-and-ready materialism with ascetic spiritual teaching, achieved great popularity, and was the first broadly “philosophical” teaching to significantly influence society at large. Compared to Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics promoted a much simplified notion of philosophy, and turned it into a complete system of truths claimed as certain. Still, they were quite sophisticated, and developed many original ideas.

Aristotle’s surviving manuscripts were later edited by several hands, including Andronicus of Rhodes (1st century BCE), a Greek who taught in Rome. With the edition of Andronicus, the works of Aristotle began to be circulated in many copies.

The oldest surviving commentaries on Aristotle are those of Aspasius (2nd century CE). The greatest Aristotelian commentator of the ancient world, Alexander of Aphrodisias, flourished in the late 2nd to early 3rd centuries CE. Recent scholarship has shown that the works of Plotinus (3rd century CE), the founder of the so-called neoplatonic school, contain abundant traces of implicit dialogue with Aristotle and Alexander, even though Plotinus identified mainly as a Platonist. Although Plotinus significantly influenced Augustine, the Athenian branch of the later neoplatonic school became a center of non-Christian spirituality and culture in the later Roman empire, and for this reason was forcibly closed in 529. The Alexandrian branch under Ammonius (5th/6th centuries) escaped a similar fate, apparently in part by shifting teaching away from the now-suspect Plato to the apparently less controversial Aristotle. The largest bulk of surviving Greek commentaries on Aristotle come from the Alexandrian neoplatonic school, and reflect neoplatonizing tendencies.

Philosophy in the period of the initial rise of Islam is not well documented, but apparently the main centers of learning moved further east from Alexandria, and extended along the Silk Route. Most Greek works were translated to Arabic from intermediate versions in Syriac. By the time of the first self-described philosopher to write in Arabic, al-Kindi (9th century), Aristotle had become unequivocally recognized as the greatest of the ancient philosophers. By the 10th century, there was an amazing flourishing of interest in Arabic translations of ancient learning among a relatively broad layer of literate skilled artisans in the middle east, as well as important sponsorship from the caliphs. While retaining some neoplatonic perspectives, the great al-Farabi (roughly 870 – 950) made strides toward recovering a more historical reading of Aristotle (but see caveat in Belief). By painstaking textual study of multiple Arabic translations, the greatest of all commentators on Aristotle in Arabic, the Andalusian Ibn Rushd or Averrroes (1126 – 1198 ), or “the” Commentator as he was known to the Latins, in a truly amazing intellectual achievement went much further in this progressive recovery of Aristotle’s meaning.

There is, then, an intriguing progressive historical sequence in the larger societal uptake of philosophical ideas, which runs from Stoicism to neoplatonism to renewed Aristotelianism.

In the Latin West, only Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation were known in the early middle ages. As more of Aristotle’s works began to be available in Latin, Peter Abelard (1079 – 1142) initiated the development that later came to be known as scholasticism. Abelard emphasized the importance of reason in theology and ethics, and in a monument of intellectual honesty compiled many conflicting opinions of authorities on various questions in Sic et Non (“Yes and No”), with discussions on ambiguities and interpretation. Translation of the commentaries of Averroes to Latin in the 13th century then sparked a gigantic development with many famous names, including Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas.

In the 12th and early 13th centuries, Christians attempting to engage in theological debate with Moslems and Jews found themselves at an embarrassing disadvantage, because educated Moslems and Jews by this time often had a great deal of Aristotelian learning, and the Christians did not. During part of the 13th century, teaching of most of the newly translated works of Aristotle was still banned in Europe. But late in the century, the Church took bold and controversial steps to actively sponsor Aristotelian learning, and began to found universities all over Europe for its promotion. In spite of the fact that Averroes was considered to have a few positions that were strongly censured by theologians, the Church nonetheless sponsored the teaching of Aristotle — most often through the commentaries of Averroes — as the foundation of all higher education. During the 14th century controversy over nominalism, for instance, the prestigious University of Paris reaffirmed that Aristotle should be taught with the interpretations of the Commentator. (See also Errors of the Philosophers.)

Aristotelian teaching in Europe grew even stronger across the Renaissance. More commentaries on Aristotle are said to have been written in the 16th century than in all previous history combined, and this continued into the early 17th century. Common stereotypes about sterile and nonsensical scholasticism are extremely prejudiced, and mostly based on sheer ignorance. Especially in Italy, there came to be a very strong tradition of independent secular Aristotelianism. Across Europe, theologians too became tremendously sophisticated in their arguments, as a result of their mandatory preliminary seven years reading Aristotle.

With the rise of early modernity in the 17th century, huge additional discontinuities followed from the transition to modern languages and printed books. Aristotle came to be generally treated with ignorant hostility by people identifying with a modern point of view. Leibniz was an exception, but only with Hegel did the trend begin to reverse again. There has been a great deal of excellent scholarship on Aristotle since the late 19th century.

Defeasible

“Defeasible” (i.e., defeatable) is a legal term metaphorically used by Brandom for anything provisionally affirmed or accepted. The great majority of things we affirm or accept fall into this category.

Brandom applies a legal model of due process to ethical negotiation. We start with presumptions of innocence and good faith. This means that until a cause for reasonable doubt is shown, we act on the assumption that people have good reasons for what they say and for what they want; but anything can be challenged. (See also Things Said; Dialogue; Assumptions; Reasons; Desire, Coherence; Commitment; Mutual Recognition; Scorekeeping.)

In general, I strongly believe that ethics should drive law and not the other way around, but I would argue that the broad notion of due process actually is a good example of ethics driving law, as it should.